*My mind and heart are, like those of so many Americans, focused on the Gulf and Iraq tonight. I am thinking about all those brave young men and women in the US and British armed forces whose lives are on the line, and send them my warm support. And I am thinking about all the innocent Iraqis in the line of fire, who fear what awaits them. I remain convinced that, for all the concerns one might have about the aftermath, the removal of Saddam Hussein and the murderous Baath regime from power will be worth the sacrifices that are about to be made on all sides. The rest of us have a responsibility to work to see that the lives lost are redeemed by the building of a genuinely democratic and independent Iraq in the coming years.



*Although Pakistan was on the list provided today by the US State Department of countries supporting the US war on Iraq, Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarallah Khan Jamali said that Pakistan was against the war. The elected parliament wished to discuss the matter, but found the government leaders vague. Apparently the military dictator Pervez Musharraf can tell Colin Powell he supports the war even as the elected PM denies that Pakistan does so. A similar dichotomy is visible in Turkey, where the elected parliament narrowly refused to allow US troops to be stationed on Turkish soil for the invasion of Iraq, but where the Turkish military is eager to cooperate with the US. The Americans are in a difficult position if they represent themselves as trying to spread democracy, but if their methods are repugnant to the few elected governments in the region. Do they have to subvert democracy to save it?



*A house exploded in the Saudi capital of Riyad. Details were scarce but it sounds like a terror cell accidentally blew itself up. Rumors are flying that radical Saudi young men are slipping over the border into Iraq to fight the Americans. This sort of thing happened in the Afghanistan war, when 5000 Pakistanis went to help the Taliban from the tribal areas in the north. Very few appear to have come back alive, having been made short work of by the AC-130s. The phenomenon of such volunteers going off to Iraq to fight the US could be a long-term terrorist problem for the post-Saddam US administration there, though.



*Egyptian human rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been found innocent by an Egyptian court of the trumped up charges against him. To his credit, George W. Bush had taken up Saad's case, and the European Union pressured Hosni Mubarak via its loan programs. It is a great day for Egypt, which has taken a small step toward being a more just and open society, one wherein advocating human rights and urging peasants to vote intelligently does not land one in jail! Saad Eddin is a great man and assured of his place in Egyptian history.



*`Abd al-Majid al-Khu'i, head of the Khu'i foundation in London, who is from the most prominent Shiite clerical family of Iraq, has denied that the US has appointed him to administer the Shiites of southern Iraq. (Too bad, in my view, since this would be a smart move.) He said it was a false rumor planted by Iranians to discredit him by associating him with the US. He pointed out in an interview with Asharq al-Awsat that all Iraqi dissident groups have been in contact with Washington about the aftermath of the war, including the pro-Tehran Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which has attended US-sponsored meetings in D.C.



He expressed concern about the damage to Iraq and to innocent life likely to be inflicted by the looming war, and called for the organization of expatriate committees dedicated to carrying out charitable and relief works to help the innocent victims of the war. He felt this would be a way of contributing to the building of a free and independent Iraq after the regime change. To have such an important Shiite cleric look forward to a free (hurr) Iraq is an encouraging sign, though his insistence on it being independent is probably a complaint about current US plans to administer it directly for a year or two.

http://hnn.us/articles/1322.html

History News Network

3-17-03: News Abroad



Why You Should Pray that We Don't Bomb the Sites Sacred to Shiites



By Juan Cole

Most Iraqi Shiites would be overjoyed to see the United States come in and effect regime change. But will the Shiites, brutalized by Saddam's tyranny, remain happy with the United States in the aftermath of the war? The US is about to take control through conquest of the holiest shrines of Shiite Islam. The sensibilities of Shiites throughout the world could easily be injured if they are damaged in war or later seen to be administered unjustly.



U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was recently quoted as saying of Iraqis, "They are overwhelmingly Shia which is different from the Wahabis of the peninsula, and they don't bring the sensitivity of having the holy cities of Islam being on their territory." He could not be more wrong. Shiites from all over the world revere the tombs of Shiite holy figures Ali and Husain in the cities of Najaf and Karbala, and many come there on pilgrimage. If a US bomb goes astray and hits either shrine, Shiites from Lebanon to Afghanistan could become enraged at the US.



It is true that some Iraqi Shiites are secular Arab nationalists. Still, large numbers of them are pious believers. Their alliance with the US is a matter of convenience. Saddam killed thousands of ordinary Shiites during the abortive 1991 uprisings after the Gulf War. Even pro-Iranian groups such as the fundamentalist Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution (SCIRI) in Iraq have been willing to ally themselves with the Bush administration. SCIRI has some 15,000 men under arms in exile in Iran, the Badr Brigade, which could play a supporting military role in the US march to Baghdad. They are already establishing beachheads in northern Iraq.



In the 1980s, in the wake of Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Shiite Iran, the Shiite branch of Islam threw up many of the more pressing challenges to the United States in the Middle East. That era of hostage-taking and terrorism largely passed after Khomeini's death in summer, 1989, as more moderate voices came to the fore. Now the major challenge comes from the Sunni radicals of al-Qaeda. Sunnis and Shiites are as different from one another as Protestants and Catholics, and al-Qaeda despises Shiites.



As the US forces leapfrog toward Baghdad from the south, they may try to take control of Najaf and Karbala. They should be careful not to damage the shrines. The US intends to impose a military government and then a US-led civilian administration on Iraq. SCIRI leader Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim has denounced the prospect of even temporary US rule over Iraq: "If the Americans do this, they will discover it is a mistake." He hinted that the Badr Brigade could turn on its US allies. Should Shiites in Najaf and Karbala become discontented with US policies and riot, and should US soldiers quell them with violence, that also could turn the world's approximately hundred million Shiites against America.



The British conquered Iraq during World War I, wresting it from the Ottoman Sunnis. But when they gave affront to the feelings of Shiites in the shrine cities, and then imposed a Mandate on the country instead of letting it become independent, they faced a major rebellion. The Shiite clerics of Najaf and Karbala were among the leaders of that failed uprising.



In 661, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, having become the leader or Imam of the early Muslim state, was assassinated. His gilded, revered tomb in Najaf, 160 km. south of Baghdad, forms a major site for pilgrims from the Shiite branch of Islam all over west and south Asia. In 681, Ali's son Husain and many family members and followers were killed when they staged an uprising against the then king of the Islamic realm. Husain's shrine is at Karbala, 100 km. southwest of Baghdad. Shiites put revering him as a martyr at the center of their spirituality, especially on 10 Muharram, which fell on March 14 this year. In 1998 a US air strike killed 17 civilians in Najaf, handing the Sunni-dominated Baath regime a propaganda tool against the US with the Shiites.



The leader of the Lebanese Hizbullah militia, Sheikh Hasan Nasrallah (who studied in Najaf), told a gathering of 150,000 Shiites honoring the Imam Husayn last Thursday that "Regarding the US war, events and all the US lying and hypocritical slogans about salvaging peoples, establishing democracy and human rights, we here declare our denunciation and rejection of this evil, arrogant and Zionist administration. We tell them, do not expect that the people of this region will receive you with flowers, rice and rose water. The region's people will receive you with rifles, blood, weapons, martyrdom and martyrdom operations."



The looming US war on Iraq may or may not go well militarily, but the US does have the advantage of overwhelming military superiority. The real question is whether it can successfully wage a war of public opinion during and after the military conflict. Iraq is a minefield of religious sensitivities because of the Shiite shrines. Unless the Bush administration is very careful, the 1920 great rebellion could be repeated, this time against an American Mandate. Worse, we could return to the bad old times of the 1980s when it was Shiite radicals who attacked Marines, blew up our embassy in Beirut, and took US hostages. We should be careful not to create allies for al-Qaeda from among its natural enemies.

It appears to be the case that Iraq simply has no nuclear weapons program.

Al-Baradei of the IAEC has swept the country with geiger counters and

cannot find evidence of such a thing. The program once employed 12,000

scientists, so it could not easily be hidden if it existed.



The evidence given last summer and fall by US officials, including

President Bush, included:



1) satellite photos showing expansion of buildings at a site once used for

the program



2) documents showing Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger



3) Iraqi purchase of aluminum tubing that might be used in centrifuges for

the enrichment of uranium.



Al-Baradei visited the buildings and found that they were now devoted to

some other use and their expansion had nothing to do with nukes.



The Niger documents were closely examined and found to be forgeries.



The aluminum tubing has the wrong specifications for use in a centrifuge

and was purchased for making conventional missiles.



The case for an Iraqi WMD program in the nuclear area has thus now

completely collapsed. Since it was the nukes that were truly scary

(rightwing commentators kept saying Saddam might give a suitcase bomb to

al-Qaeda, never a likely scenario), not botulism or mustard gas, one

wonders if the Congress would have authorized the President to go to war if

it had known there were no nukes.



The Niger documents turn out to be clumsy forgeries, raising questions about whether Bush, Cheney and others who depended on them were attempting to deceive US public opinion and that of the world.



*An Israeli soldier deliberately ran a bulldozer over an American peace activist attempting to stop the illegal demolition of a Palestinian home. Rachel Corey, 23, died of skull and chest fractures when she was run over and then the driver backed up over her.



*The Muslim Brotherhood representatives in the Egyptian parliament have demanded that Egypt forbid the US to transport war ships to the Gulf via the Suez Canal. They also want the Mubarak regime to refuse to accept the $2 bn. in aid received from the US every year (most of it anyway goes to US firms who supply goods and weapons to Egypt). Next the chickenhawks will be saying we need to occupy the Suez Canal zone. Anthony Eden has been reincarnated as Richard Perle and is taking revenge on the US for his humiliation by maneuvering it into an even greater one.



*Ariel Sharon has again rejected the Bush "road map" for peace, insisting he will not accept an independent, viable Palestinian state. It was not reported if he was brandishing a toy bulldozer during this rant. Seriously, couldn't he shut his enormous pie hole until the Iraq war is over? The US doesn't need more Arabs angry at it right about now. Apparently we should pay him $14 bn. for the privilege of being backstabbed this way.

*Pakistani authorities have arrested Yasser al-Jaziri, a North African al-Qaeda leader, in the posh Gulburg district of Lahore. They met no resistance after acting on a tip. The report identified him as a Moroccan or Moroccan-Algerian dual national responsible for al-Qaeda business interests. He was apparently arrested based on information brought in by the apprehension earlier this month of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, al-Qaeda's no. 3. The Pakistani family with whom he was staying was not taken into custody. He was one of those whom Pakistani physician Ahmad Javed Khwaja had been accused of being in touch with. The arrest follows the apprehension of 5 al-Qaeda men in Peshawar on Mar. 11.



*Asharq al-Awsat says that Islamist circles in London fear that if Bin Laden is killed or captured, it will deal a death blow to al-Qaeda and its generation of jihadis or radical militants. They say Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two man, lacks Bin Laden's charisma and his long months on the run have left him with no control over the network; and Saad Bin Laden is only in his 20s and cannot actually take over his father's organization. (Saad is thought to be in southwestern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border). On the other hand, they are confident that a new generation of jihadis is now growing up, and that Bin Laden has succeeded in convincing them that their primary target should be the United States.

*Saudi-based reporter John R. Bradley says in the Sidney Morning Herald that the Saudi Defense Minister, Sultan b. Abdul Aziz, has confirmed that "that United States troops have arrived in the northern garrison town of Tabuk." He says other credible reports indicate a US presence there and at Arar airport not far from the Saudi-Iraqi border. He adds, "From Arar the Americans could pour into Iraq's western desert or go directly by road towards Baghdad, forcing the Iraqis to face an attack from the west as well as the expected southern assault from Kuwait and a second front in the north." He points out that this is strong evidence that the Saudi princes have thrown in with the US attack on Iraq, despite public opposition to the war.



*A secret State Department report throws cold water over the idea that a democratic Iraq will help spread democracy in the Middle East in the aftermath of a US attack and occupation. In typical State Department fashion, the report also wonders whether "procedural democracy", i.e. elections without a strong liberal democratic culture, would even be a good idea in the region. Proto-fascist "Islamists" might well come to power that way. While I agree that the Iraqi experiment is highly unlikely to result in democratization of the region, I am not sure that continued dictatorships are all that much better for US interests, much less local people, than would be democratic governments with substantial participation by Islamists. It is a tough call.



*The Israeli military chief of staff says that getting rid of Arafat is an urgent priority for him; an extreme rightwing member of the Israeli Knesset urges that Abu Mazen, the new prime minister praised by President Bush, be arrested if he comes to Israel; the Labor Party continues to collapse and split; Israeli policies of shooting first and asking questions later in the West Bank and Gaza finally backfired on them when soldiers shot two Israeli military men in plain clothes by accident. The policy has resulted in large numbers of innocent Palestinian civilians, including children, being killed or wounded.



*In Egypt 5,000 demonstrators protested the looming Iraq war and the treatment of Palestinians by Israeli forces at the al-Azhar seminary, calling for jihad against US soldiers if they attack Iraq. This event follows the recent call for jihad against a US Iraq war issued by the usually staid and sober al-Azhar a couple of days ago. It seems to me a little unlikely that any volunteers who go to Iraq will pose much of a challenge to US AC-130s, who made short work of similar volunteers who went to Afghanistan from Pakistan last winter. But the increased threat of terrorism and asymmetrical attacks should be obvious.

*Today is Ashura', the holiest day of the Shiite Muslim calendar, consecrated to mourning the martyrdom of the Prophet's grandson Husayn. It is a time of religious excitement, and young men often beat their chests and backs, sometimes with chains. In Lebanon yesterday, the head of the Shiite militia Hizbullah, Shaikh Hasan Nasrallah, warned the US against invading Iraq. He was responding to pronouncements in Washington that Iraqis would welcome a US invastion. According to Reuters, he said, "Don't expect the people of this region to receive you with flowers and perfume. The people of this region will receive you with rifles, blood, arms, martyrdom and martyrdom operations." He said that "Death to America" was his movement's cry. About 60-65% of Iraqis are Shiites, but they have been brutalized by the Baath regime of Saddam Hussein and have a very different outlook from that of the Lebanese, who were invaded by Ariel Sharon in 1982. It is not impossible, though, that the presence for 2 or 3 years of US troops in Iraq might radicalize the Iraqi Shiites and bring them closer to Hizbullah's mindset.



*The files found on Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's computer mentioned six specific sites along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that Bin Laden is known to use as hide-outs. This information was the basis for the new optimism that Bin Laden might be captured soon. It seems to me, though, that he must have immediately known he would have to avoid past safe houses as soon as he heard of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad's arrest.



*Units of the Shiite al-Badr Brigade are being positioned south of Sulyamaniyyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, having come over from Iran. The good thing about them is that they hate Saddam and will help the US get rid of him. The bad news is that they are religious hardliners a la Khomeini, which is not a direction any of us would like to see Iraq go after the war.



*A bomb blast on a Bombay commuter train killed 11 and injured 75 yesterday. The populace is jittery and today the trains were half empty. Everyone is afraid that the bomb was related to religious violence (it is after all `Ashura'). An attack on a train by Muslim radicals ignited anti-Muslim riots in Gujerat last year.

Midnight's Other Children: Reading Rushdie in the Middle East

Talk Delivered at a Panel in Honor of the Premiere of Midnight's Children The Play in Ann Arbor

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

-Juan Cole



When I refer to reading Rushdie in the Middle East in my title, I do not, of course, mean to suggest that his novels are actually much read there. Ironically, the early 1980s translations of Midnight’s Children and Shame into Persian caused Rushdie to be admired in Iran for his anti-imperialism. After the infamous fatwa, the further translations in Persian showed on their title pages as place of publication exotic Estockaholm in the fabled land of Swed. A few Arabic translations in small print runs are rumored. Almost no one in the Middle East has actually read the novel, The Satanic Verses, and most of those who condemn it would be surprised to know that it does not call the wives of the Prophet Muhammad prostitutes, and does not suggest that the Koran was inspired by Satan. What I mean by “reading Rushdie” in the area is rather akin to the psychiatric idea of projection, defined as “a defense mechanism by which your own traits and emotions are attributed to someone else.”



I do not come to this subject as a cold stranger, but by way of autobiography. Midnight’s Children informs us that people seep into one another. Of no people is this more true than of us area specialists, into whom seep whole civilizations. Some of the Prophet Muhammad seeped into me when I studied Islam in Cairo, and I came to admire him. Then when I was researching Indian history in Lucknow in 1982 I read Midnight’s Children, and Rushdie began seeping into me, and I came to admire him. If I sometimes seem grouchy or disoriented, remember that like Walt Whitman I contain multitudes. Only some of my multitudes do not get on very well.



Like the impressive nose of Aadam Aziz, which contained dynasties, Rushdie’s Himalayan anathema contained clones. “The Rushdie of” this nation or that has virtually become a dead metaphor, like riverbed, so tired that one forgets it is figure of speech. Hamid Nasr Abu Zaid is the Rushdie of Egypt and historian Hashem Aghajari is the Rushdie of Iran (which has more Rushdies than most countries, having itself invented the idea of a Rushdie). This rushdification of religious dissent or free thought has elicited protests from the original Rushdie, who minds being “sloganized;” and from some of the Rushdies themselves or their supporters. When Aghajari called for independent religious thinking in Iran last summer, a provincial court summarily sentenced him to death. When he was arrested, Ayatollah Nuri-Hamedani thundered, “I believe that the remarks . . . are worse than Salman Rushdie's words. This is because Salman Rushdie only insulted one of the Islamic principles. However, he, Aghajari has insulted all religions and world Muslims.”



A stalwart defender of Aghajari from among the hardliners, Muhammad Javad Akbarayn, replied with alarm, “A comparison between Hashem Aghajari [and] Salman Rushdie most regrettably gives credibility to Salman Rushdie, as well as false impressions to a younger generation unfamiliar with The Satanic Verses. They might overlook the fact that the author of the book "A critique of Satanic Verses Plot" . . . reprinted several times to meet the demand for it -- is an academic who resigned from his post in protest at the Aghajari sentence.” The hardest of hardliners seemed to be saying that that Rushdie fellow wasn’t so bad after all, now that we have Iranian thinkers calling for freedom of religious thought among the masses. In the prevailing school of Shiite Islam in Iran, the laity is required blindly to obey the rulings of clerics on Islamic law. Aghajari called instead for each Muslim to be his own interpreter of the law.



Ironically, Akbarayn is clearly distressed by the possibility that the many ardent defenders of Aghajari among Iran’s youth will hear that he is a Rusdhie and will transfer their affections to the Bombay-born heresiarch himself. In short, the danger for his opponents in the area is that Rushdie will become an Aghajari, a symbol of the young reformers’ impatience with heresy trials of any sort.



This odd sort of reading, which the cynical might even call simply using Rushdie’s name to advance one’s own agenda, has killed people, and has produced the new phenomenon in history of the “Rushdie riot.” The old leftist warhorse of Turkey, Aziz Nesin, expropriated some passages from The Satanic Verses for his newspaper, under the sympathetic title: “Salman Rushdie: Thinker or Charlatan?” Although international copyright laws are generally respected in Turkey, Nesin declined to seek either Rushdie’s or his publisher’s permission. He simply wanted to bait the Islamists. Nesin very nearly paid for his piracy with his life. In July of 1993, a convention was held in Sivas of the esoteric Shiite Alawite sect in honor of one of their poets, to which Nesin was invited. Local Sunni activists have long persecuted and sometimes killed Alawites. Further inflamed by news of Nesin’s appearance on the roster, they formed rampaging mobs and set fire to the convention hotel and killed nearly 40 persons. Although Rushdie’s name was invoked in the incident, in fact, Sunni-Alawite riots have been common in modern Turkish history, as has a tendency for Alawites to align with or produce leftist intellectuals that enrage the Sunni fundamentalists. Once again, primordial rivalries and the nagging questions of secularism and Islamism in Turkey were projected onto Salman Rushdie’s balding pate.



The Egyptian short story writer and novelist Soleiman Fayyad, author of Voices, spoke for many Middle Eastern intellectuals when he wrote, “We Arab and Muslim writers are surely overwhelmingly with Salman Rushdie in spirit, then, even if we are not necessarily in favor of his novel, which the majority of us have probably not read . . . Nevertheless, there does exist among us an almost unanimous attitude of solidarity with Salman Rushdie as well as one of support for freedom of thought, whether religious or profane, and of artistic creation.” Fayyad’s comments point once more to projection as the main theme evoked by Rushdie in the Middle East. Even Fayyad has a reproach for Rushdie, however, of cosmopolitanism. He should have stayed in India and published the book in Urdu, which would have gained him even greater and more enthusiastic backing from writers “in this part of the world.” And, publishing in the West opened his work to exploitation by anti-Muslim Westerners, “an important supplementary grief this author did not need to be saddled with.” Fayyad is suggesting that his use of English and the publication of his book in the West allowed his Middle Eastern enemies to accuse him of seeking literary success among foreigners by putting down his own people. He thinks the positive impact of the Rushdie affair was unfortunately muted because it could be portrayed in the Middle Eastern press as yet another instance of neo-colonial hegemony. The courage of Fayyad’s statement should not be underestimated. In speaking out, he put his own life in danger. But his binary Arab nationalism makes him regret that Rushdie could not be claimed and defended unambiguously as one of “us.”



Just as Fayyad feared, Rushdie’s name has been exploited by Islamophobes. September 11 accelerated this process. Journalist Les Kinsolving is clearly annoyed that President Bush has defended Islam as a religion of peace. He pressed Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer at a press conference last year asking, “Are you and is the president prepared to contend that in the Koran, there are no passages calling for death to infidels such as Christians and Jews and no jihads (sic) as well for people like Salman Rushdie?” Kinsolving is apparently unaware that the Koran praises Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity, and only urges fighting against those who allied with the Meccans to attack Muslims. And there is not a single verse requiring novelists to be executed, even ones named Salman. Recently Jerry Falwell denounced Muhammad a terrorist, and other televangelists have monstrously called him a pedophile. Momentarily mishearing a few verses looks increasingly like a rather mild charge against him.



This use of Rushdie as a bat with which to beat all Muslims and Islam predates September 11, of course. One of the first books about the Khomeini fatwa was written by far rightwing commentator and Islamophobe Daniel Pipes, who is linked to the most militant sections of the Likud Party and to the pro-settler Gamla group. Pipes clearly had to hold his nose in defending Rushdie, a leftist anti-imperialist who thought well of the Sandinistas’ social programs for the poor in Nicaragua. Yet, he found the opportunity to lambaste Muslims too good to pass up.



Pipes’s book is shot through with essentialism and questionable generalizations. “Not only,” he solemnly tells us, “ are Muslims very touchy about perceived disparagements of their religion, but they tend to look at fictional works in a singularly literal way.” (107). Really? Muslims alone among human beings are touchy about their sacred cows, so to speak? Over a billion persons, crippled with a fiction deficit disorder that would stump even Oliver Sacks? But then, pray tell, how did such a community produce a Rushdie in the first place? Not to mention A Thousand and One Nights or Nobel prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz?

But Pipes has not finished characterizing the Muslims. He had already begun worrying about the immigration of these congenital, unrelenting realists to Europe and the United States. He complained (and remember he does so ostensibly in defense of Rushdie): “Unfortunately, the presence of Muslims in the West encourages the worst in each camp: ugly nativistic reactions from those who resent the growing numbers of dark-skinned, poor foreigners with strange eating habits and less-developed notions of hygiene; and arrogant fundamentalist Islamic ambitions among emigrants culturally unprepared for immersion in an alien civilization and therefore prone to insist on the most dogmatic version of their faith.” (245). Even if we allow that Pipes was in these characterizations adopting the “voice” of each of the two rival bands of extremists, his diction can only be seen as racist in its effect. All the blame for ugly nativism is put on the presumptuous presence of Muslims in the West. His diction is a recipe for the expulsion from the West of anyone who makes white racists upset. And, one would never know from such a passage that South Asian Muslim immigrants to the US are among the wealthiest and best educated groups in the country; or that pious Muslims wash five times a day and if anything are too worried about hygiene; or that large numbers of urban Britishers would starve to death were all those Indian restaurants serving what he calls “strange” food suddenly to close their doors.



Pipes’s are thus precisely the sort of anti-Muslim sentiments that The Satanic Verses was written to protest. In the subsequent decade he began taking an anti-immigration line redolent of French racist Jean Marie Le Pen. Not only should they be carefully caged in Africa and Asia, but, Pipes has now told the Jerusalem Post, Muslims must be kept under constant surveillance when not in their natural habitat. He writes, “There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children… “ (JP 1/22/03). From defending Rushdie’s right to freedom of speech, Pipes has gone to implicitly calling for him, like others of Muslim background, to be watched by the FBI for signs he might be a terrorist.



I should declare my interest and reveal that Pipes, in a bizarre twist, has even issued a fatwa of his own against me, calling for Juan Cole to be placed under constant surveillance by the people of Ann Arbor, who should report to him on me so that he can keep a file. (I hope you are all taking good notes). This tactic recalls Khomeini’s boast that he had 37 million spies in Iran. Apparently even studying Muslims can give you the new disease of surveillance-itis. I told you it was autobiographical. Way too much seeping.



Many have drawn the lesson from September 11 that Rushdie was a canary in a mine, that his ordeal presaged that of all who stood against a new wave of religious fanaticism. But there is an additional lesson, which is that whenever you give governments or other organizations the right to tell people what they can say, they will use it. When Disney’s ABC network fired comedian Bill Maher from Politically Incorrect for mouthing off about US military tactics, Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer announced, “These are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say and what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that. There never is.” Khomeini would have said the same thing about The Satanic Verses. Having now been guilty of it myself, let me end by sympathizing with Salman Rushdie about the ways he has been used so extensively to further the agendas of others, and to congratulate him on having become such a powerful symbol of liberty to so many in the Middle East and elsewhere, whether he likes it or not, and even whether they like it or not.