The State of the Art(30)

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