Part One: Comparisons

There is plenty more to The Satanic Verses and the Rushdie affair than a mere succès de scandale. The least that one can say on this score is that we have had a very vivid demonstration of the fact that creative fiction matters politically and that books which make a difference with the wide public can still be written and published. Therefore, assuming a dismissive attitude towards the novel and the furor it provoked is ill-considered, especially at a time when cultural chauvinism, conservative parochialism and narcissistic particularism seem to have the upper hand in many places. That such an attitude proved alarmingly widespread in American academic circles and among U.S. intellectuals, I learned from personal experience while lecturing, discussing and debating at various American institutions of higher learning throughout the last academic year (1988-1989). Thus, in commenting critically on such phenomena as Rushdie's indifferent defenders, undiscriminating critics and dismissive detractors in the West, I shall try to keep an eye on the revealing, the symptomatic and the unsaid in what passed as the Rushdie affair, debate and polemics.

It was certainly revealing to me that hardly any of the Western intellectuals who rallied to the defense of Salman Rushdie – individually and collectively – came anywhere near regarding him as a Muslim dissident who bears some family resemblances to the celebrated literary-critical dissidents of the Communist countries so enthusiastically adopted by the West and so heartily defended by its intelligentsia. We all know by now that two members of Sweden's Nobel Prize awarding Academy of Letters took the unprecedented step of resigning their life-long membership in that august body on account of the Academy's refusal to come out fully in support of Rushdie the author. A simple comparison of the Academy´s stand on the Rushdie affair with its highly publicized support of and prizes to dissident authors from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is sufficient to drive the message home.