File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1996/96-02-20.131, message 186


Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 20:35:33 -0800 (PST)
From: Suresht Bald <sbald-AT-willamette.edu>
Subject: Re: the Rushdie fatwa


Austin,
In which country was this mosque located?
Suresht Bald

On Fri, 26 Jan 1996, Austin Meredith wrote:

> > What made Rushdie's novels offensive to Muslims was his defaming of the 
> > holy, the sacred.... I think the "left" wing can also be equally 
> > capable of declaring its own fatwa of sorts....
> 
> I'd like to help problematize the case of Rushdie and the fatwa against
> him, by supplying some overlooked middle ground. Or, a reality check: 
> 
> I was last year visiting a mosque (masjed) and while the people I was with
> were saying their prayers in the central room, I was at loose ends and
> happened to wander into the library room of that mosque. Most of the books
> on the shelves were opaque to me since they were in Arabic script, but
> here and there were a few books in various of the European languages, the
> titles of which I could make out. Well-thumbed books on learning English,
> elementary textbooks of the sciences, etc. It amused me to see what sorts
> of Western literature had worked its way into a mosque library, especially
> in a mosque which by my observation had a congregation made up mostly of
> working-class, marginally educated persons. Well, what should I see on the
> shelf but a copy of Rushdie's infamous slandrous THE SATANIC VERSES
> itself! And, taking this tome down from the shelf, I noticed also that it
> was well thumbed throughout, and I noticed in addition that there were
> _not_ egregious underlinings and that the margins did _not_ contain the
> sort of hot scribblings which a reader of our press might have been
> expecting to discover there. 
> 
> Does this factoid not offer an interesting contrast with what we have been
> hearing by way of the press? If the situation really is as it is being
> reported to us, what was such a book doing in such a library, especially
> lying there on an open low shelf available to Moslem children etc? 
> 
> \s\ Austin Meredith <r2chow-AT-uci.edu>, "Stack of the Artist of Kouroo" Project
> 
> 
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> 


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