censorship with a couple of classes, but still hadn't
read the novel, and it just hadn't occurred to me
somebody like Mo - who hadn't been in either of
those classes - might be on the side of the bad
guys.
'Mo; is there a problem?'
'That is not a good book, Mr Munro,' he said,
looking at it, not me. 'It is evil; blasphemous.'
(Embarrassed silence from the others.)
'Look, Mo, I'll put the book away if it offends you,'
I told him (doing just that). 'But I think we have to
talk about this.All right; I haven't read the book
myself yet, but I was talking to Doctor Metcalf the
other day, and he said he had, and the passages
some people found objectionable were a couple of
pages at most, and he couldn't see what the fuss
was about.I mean, this is a novel, Mo.It isn't a
religious tract; it means to be fiction.'
'That isn't the point, Mr Munro,' Mo said.He was
looking at my little red rucksack as though there
was a nuclear bomb inside it. 'Rushdie has insulted
all Muslims.He has spat in the face of every one of
us.It's as if he has called all our mothers whores.'
'Mo,' I said, and couldn't help grinning as I put the
rucksack down on the floor, 'it's only a story.'
'The form is not important.It is a work in which
Allah is insulted,' Mo said. 'You can't understand,
Mr Munro.There is nothing you hold that sacred.'
'Oh no?How about freedom of speech?'
'But when the National Front wanted to use the
Students' union , you were with us on the
demonstration, weren't you?What about their
freedom of speech?'
'They want to take it away from everybody else;
come on, Mo.You're not denying them freedom of
speech, you're protecting the freedoms of the
people they'd persecute if they were allowed any
power.'
'But in the short term you are denying them the
right to state their views in public, are you not?'
'The way you'd deny somebody the freedom to put
a gun to another person's head and pull the trigger,
yes.'
'So, clearly your belief in freedom generally can
override any particular freedom; these freedoms
are not absolute.Nothing is sacred to you, Mr
Munro.You base your beliefs on the products of
human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise.You
might believe in certain things, but you do not have
faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.'
'So because I don't have what I think of as
superstitions, because I believe we just happen to
exist, and believe in science, evolution, whatever;
I'm not as worthy as somebody who has faith in an
ancient book and a cruel, desert God?I'm sorry,
Mo, but for me, Christ and Muhammed were both
just men; charismatic, gifted in various ways, but
still just mortal human beings, and the scholars and
monks and disciples and historians who wrote
about them or recorded their thoughts and their
lives were inspired all right, but not by God; by
something from inside them, something every
writer has in fact something every human has.Mo;
definitions.Faith is belief without proof.I can't
accept that.Now, it doesn't bother me that you can,
so why does it bother you so much that I think the
way I do, or Salman Rushdie thinks the way he
does?'
'Clearly, your soul is your own concern, Mr
Munro.Rushdie's is his.To think blasphemous
thoughts is to restrict the sin to oneself, but to
blaspheme in public is deliberately to assault those
who do believe.It is to rape our souls.'
Can you believe this?This guy's heading for a First;
his father's an astro-physicist, for Christ's
sake.Mo's probably going to be a lecturer himself
(he already puts 'clearly' at the start of his
sentences; good grief, he's halfway there!).It's very
nearly 1989 but it's midnight in the dark ages just
the thickness of a book away, the thickness of a
skull away; just the turn of a page away.
So, an argument, while the leafless trees and the
cold brown fields stream by beyond the carriage's
double-glazing, and the inevitable wailing child
howled somewhere in the distance.
But what do you say?I asked him about the kids
who rode across the minefields on their Hondas,
clearing the way for the Iranian Army, the hard
way.Insane, to me.To Mo?Maybe misguided,
maybe used, but still glorious.I told him that while
I hadn't read The Satanic Verses, I had read the
Koran, and found it almost as ludicrous and
objectionable as the Bible and after that I got a bit
loud, while Mo went very quiet and forbidding and
curt, and one of the others had verbally to separate
us. (Coincidence; I read the Penguin edition of the
Koran - edited by a Jew, Mo claims, and unholy
too because it puts the passages in the wrong order
- and Viking, who publish 'TSV, are part of the
same group fertile ground for a conspiracy
theory?)
Mo and I shook hands, later on, but it spoiled the