In his column below, Simon Lincoln Reader responds to the stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie in New York last week, pointing out how the ideological compass point has moved in the last 30 years since the fatwa against Rushdie was decreed. Since then, he argues, something has changed regarding Islam’s place in the West. Woke theory architects have attempted to co-opt the religion, he claims, and by default, Islamism, into their corner as a persecuted minority with protected features, leading to the idea that western civilisation was and is the culprit. – Sandra Laurence
Intersectionalism – Islam’s useful idiot
By Simon Lincoln Reader*
It took just over 30 years, but eventually the Iranian extremist Ruhollah Khomeini got (part of) his wish: two days after I arrived back in the US last week, the author Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed at an event in upstate New York. Rushdie has survived, but the attack by another demented extremist will in all likelihood cost him an eye. There is dark irony to the timing – for most of this year and the last, one of Joe Biden’s principal handlers, the embittered Attorney General Merrick Garland, has been spitting blood about a largely mythical group he calls “white domestic terrorists”. Obsessed with Donald Trump and willing to abuse and/or weaponise the state to pursue him in a way that resembles Thabo Mbeki’s arrogant folly of 2005, his charges clearly were distracted when an actual, foreign terrorist attack occurred on American soil last Friday.
It cost the British taxpayer over £10m to protect Rushdie once Khomeini’s fatwa was declared on Rushdie courtesy of his novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1989. Others linked to the publication weren’t afforded the same protection, and paid with their lives: translators and publishers of the book across Europe and Asia were stabbed or shot. Also in 1989, yet another extremist clown tried to hide a bomb in a book and deliver it to Rushdie, but the thing exploded in the moron’s lap whilst he was driving around Paddington.
I’m more interested – and I imagine you are too – in observing the response to Rushdie’s attack than studying the merits of The Satanic Verses because doing so would legitimise the criticism. Remember Rushdie is, by any measurement, of the left – but that left with whom you could identify Uruguay’s former President Jose Mujica (stubborn, awkward, admirable) is slipping from view, and its replacement is a sort of cowardly, establishment-approved-narrative synthetic that submits to the idea that what Rushdie wrote was wrong. Once upon a time when the author Stephen King wasn’t off his rocker he expressed outrage that some random bookshop here in America had decided to blacklist The Satanic Verses and so threatened to remove his own books from that store. That would just not happen today (King is now completely off the reservation).
And that’s because something occurred over Islam’s place in the west. That is what’s known as intersectionalism (Woke theory), and during its rapid oil slick, its architects attempted to co-opt the religion, and by default, Islamism, into its corner as a persecuted minority with protected features. Here’s where it gets funny: the man of today’s cowardly synthetic establishment-left (take the leader of UK’s Labour Keir Starmer as one of many, many millions) openly kneels to intersectionalism, and Starmer’s own tepid, dead-fish-handshake response to the Rushdie stabbing reveals this. But Islam itself never consented to this arrangement, as fundamental disagreements between the two make alliance impossible. Just one example: Islam has no interest in Pride Month. In June, virtue signalling global corporations alter their logos to the rainbow flag – with the exception of their operations in the Middle East. So whilst intersectionalism’s proponents will condemn Rushdie, Islamism cannot stand intersectionalism – but may find it an occasional useful idiot.
The effect of Rushdie’s fatwa has been gradual yet profound, kettling reporting and commentary into a choice that should never have had to be made: either say nothing, or shift critical analysis reserved for people such as Iran’s tyrants and their supporters onto the likes of Donald Trump or Helen Zille or Tony Abbott or Victor Orban – so they receive disproportionate scrutiny. The effect on free speech here is undeniable, resulting in an asymmetrical world view that now ventures into areas where it doesn’t belong, creating problems where none should exist (the racism supply and demand issue as one example: huge demand, little supply). But perhaps the worst consequence has been to circulate the idea that western civilisation was and is the culprit – all well and platitudinal, until a brutal event such as the one that occurred last Friday arrives to explain otherwise.
- Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Substack.
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- SLR: Give me old-fashioned South African corruption any time!
