The Point: Until the Lion Learns to Speak

Friday, June 09, 2006

Until the Lion Learns to Speak

SINCE IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO AVOID THE SERIES OF EVENTS THAT HAS PLAYED OUT IN Toronto this last week, I have decided to add an additional book that has something to say about fear and extremism, one you may have heard of. It's Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, and it is as relevant (and controversial) today as it was when he wrote it in 1988. I'll also be talking about a children's book called The Remarkable Maria, written by Edmonton's Patti McIntosh and illustrated by fellow Edmontonian Tara Langlois and the kids of SMART, Suriname Art. It's a story about belonging and about standing up for yourself, and it has a special relevance at the moment.

Well, the elephant in the room this week is the series of arrests made in Toronto last weekend by Canada's RCMP. It's hard to read the paper these days without finding a story about the 12 men and 5 youth arrested on a raft of terrorism-related charges under Canada's new Anti-Terrorism legislation. Now, I use the word 'new' in two contexts here, which I should mention because this act was passed in 2002. The first is that it has only been used once before, in the case of a Canadian man charged in connection with alleged terrorist activities in the UK, and the second is that this legislation reflects a series of relatively new undercurrents in Canadian society.

The media's coverage has been hard and fast regarding the 17 individuals accused in connection with attempts to commit unspecified terrorist acts in southern Ontario, who were brought before a court in Brampton earlier this week. Headlines about alleged plots to 'behead' Prime Minister Stephen Harper and bomb the Peace Tower on Parliament Hill have flashed across papers from Calgary to Halifax, and reporters are posing the question of how Canada could have its own 'homegrown terrorists.' Well, Salman Rushdie has written passionately about the need for pause at a time like this to evaluate just what is really going on, and it is his most controversial book, The Satanic Verses, that I'll be talking about first to try to pry the edges open on all this national soul-searching.

The bombings of September 11, 2001, brought Islamic extremism to the forefront of the contemporary Western consciousness, but tensions between Muslims and mainstream society in North America and Western Europe are anything but new. Rushdie's novel, a series of interwoven stories set in India, the Middle East, and Britain, is expertly sewn together by complex messages about faith, power, and transformation. It is a novel that equally accosts hardline religious devotion and the tendency for countries like Britain and Canada to attach a heavy amount of ideological baggage to immigrants and minorities.

The main thrust of the story follows two men, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, both Indian by birth and performers by trade, but who have attempted to pursue radically different approaches to life. These two men, whom we meet together as they descend through the air amid the gently falling wreckage of a jetliner, have taken entirely different tacks in confronting their respective pasts and their relationship with their chosen homes. For Saladin, who long ago presumed his name too unpronounceable for the particular sensibilities of his adopted London and shortened the undulating 'Chamchawalla' to a somewhat more abrupt 'Chamcha,' integration is next to godliness, and he has tried his damnedest to annihalate any unpalateable Indian-ness from his accent. In the process of trying to blend in with the crowd, however, he had become completely invisible, and reached the peak of his (admittedly, modest) career as a voice actor on, appropriately, a show about aliens. For Gibreel, however, it is the singing, dancing limelight of Bollywood to which he must aspire, and his richly deserved notoriety in India erupts from his brilliant portrayal of a pantheon of deities.

Ironies of their aspirations aside, their stories weave in and out first with that of the founding of a religion that is not named Islam by a prophet who is not named Mohammed, then with that of a woman with a strange relationship to butterflies that may or may not be able to lead a village to their salvation. Less like nesting dolls than snakes devouring each others' tails, they weave in and out of one another in sometimes jarring, sometimes transcendent ways, and all hum the tuneless song Gibreel greets us with as he soars (spectacularly) towards the earth -- 'To be born again, first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly.'

I think of Clarice Lispector's Macabea, and of the chilling statement that what is ripest is also closest to rotting.

Rushdie's book is about transformation, but it is also about dogma, and unswerving loyalty to an Idea. He poses the question again and again -- 'What kind of idea are you?' One way to look at this question may be to examine the roots of religious extremism, and as my friend Danielle pointed out to me, it is impossible to discuss Rushdie's work without discussing his life. Indeed, it can seem at times that this heavy baggage threatens to rush up against the miraculous font through which his stories flow so richly, and few authors can claim to have had death threats made against them or a fatwa issued in their name by the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

Although the book is in many ways directed at immigrants like himself (Rushdie was born in Mumbai and studied in England), the backlash from some Muslims, even in the West, was fierce -- Rushdie, it must be said, was raised in a Muslim family but does not consider himself one today. The book certainly seems to call into question the character of Mohammed and his wives, not to mention raising the question of what compromises one may make to promote an Idea, but this is not the only dialogue to the book (and is told through the dreams of a character who is quite possibly insane). Another interpretation of the idea question, as Paul Brians has pointed out, may be to ask members of Indian, Jamaican, Jewish diasporas what kind of identity they wish to create for themselves in their adopted homelands. Throughout the novel, it is the characters who are at the edges of so much Western literature that are brought to the forefront, and the ones who consider themselves more 'British' are at the periphery, playing bit parts in a story that is at heart about the Other.

These are not weak, oppressed refugees of colonialism trodden down by history. They are flawed, they do unforgiveable things, but most of all they are human, and this fits in quite well with Rushdie's refusal to allow those made into the Other to quietly let history bob by. 'Ideologically, I refuse to accept the position of victim,' muses one character. 'Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsbility of the abused; our passiveness colludes with, permits such crimes.' Yet neither is he afraid to explore the limits of reaction to this.

In countries like France, Australia, and the Netherlands, it seems as though a wave of intolerance has lapped up against the shore and left a film that truly denigrades us all. The Walrus ran an excellent piece a few months ago about the failures and successes of multiculturalism in countries like those and here in Canada, and the possibility of violence as Canada's visible minorities begin to run up against immigration policies designed for another era.

Fears of Muslim extemists have made many non-Muslims in the West seriously consider curtailing fundamental human rights of their fellow citizens in the name of security. A poll conducted in the US by Cornell University, published in December 2004, revealed that 27 percent of those polled believed Muslim Americans should be required to register their location with the federal government, 22 percent said the government should profile citizens based on the fact that they are Muslim or have Middle Eastern heritage, and almost half said they believed some curtailment of civil liberties was necessary for Muslim Americans. Canadian society, in most places, would probably not reflect such a high figures, but it is possible the line between the Muslim Canadian population as a whole and the small number of radicals accused in connection with terrorist attacks is blurring for some. Just this week, a mosque in Toronto's Rexdale neighbourhood had 28 windows broken in the aftermath of the arrests. Damnation of the suspects as terrorists in newspapers like the Edmonton Journal before any evidence had been presentedcannot help but contribute to the problem.

When citizens become enemies before they have had access to a fair trial, we call into question the entire notion of the presumption of innocence, on the basis of accusations that have not yet been proven in court, and information from CSIS, Canada's spy agency, has proved dangerously unreliable in the past. Maher Arar, the man who was sent through Jordan to Syria after being stopped at a US airport, was sent to a country with a well-known record of human rights abuses on information provided by CSIS suggesting he was involved in terrorist activities -- despite the fact that he was holding a Canadian passport. Arar was detained by Syrian authorities for a year and, on return, reported brutal torture during his incarceration there.

Salman Rushdie has vehemently condemned the practice of sending terrorism suspects to countries with more dubious human rights records like Egypt and Syria via a third country, and has taken special care to exact damning indictment on the deceptive newspeak used by the American government to describe this practice: 'extraordinary rendition.' Europe's human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, recently published a report suggesting several European countries have also been complicit in this 'rendition' by allowing suspects to be taken through their countries to underground prisons in Romania and Poland. Maher Arar's case, and those of others like him who have been found innocent after being 'rendered' to such prisions, must make us at the very least give pause at the presumption of guilt upon the individual, and should, by all rights, demand that we seriously question the assignment of blame to a much larger group within which these individuals have been accused.

On Thursday, Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association, joined other Muslim groups in Canada in calling for a summit with Prime Minister Harper, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, and Toronto Mayor David Miller, as well as a range of community and youth groups, to discuss how Canadian society as a whole can play a part in addressing radicalism within Muslim communities, particularly among young people. 'We're not here to say we don't have an issue. Of course we have an issue,' she told the Toronto Star. 'But we're part of Canadian society and so we demand that the Canadian society come forward, help us root out this.' She said the growing problem she is seeing with Muslim youth today is not radicalisation, but marginalisation. 'I'm seeing more isolation and children feeling as if they don't belong,' she said, 'because of the onslaught on Islam, Islamophobia, the anti-Muslim tilt in the media. And they feel there's no venue where they can express that resentment.'

Hussein Hamdani agrees. Hamdani, part of the Ihya Foundation, a Toronto-based not-for-profit agency aimed at fostering Canadian Muslim identity, works with a lot of young people. 'For many of them, they think that Canada, their own country, has declared war on them or their people,' Hamdani told CBC News. 'And they think that Canada has aligned itself too closely with the United States and U.S. foreign policy, and that the war on terrorism is a war against Islam.' Part of a strategy to encourage greater tolerance among communities and feelings of inclusion, he said, should be encouraging Canadians to get to know each other better.

'It's easy to demonize someone you don't know, but it's much harder to do so when you get to know them.'

In The Satanic Verses, this process of demonisation takes on a character of its own. For even as Gibreel becomes angelicised amidst the increasing possibility of his own madness and his selfish love for a certain mountain climber, Saladin is apprehended and 'rendered' by the British authorities upon a wet arrival and made out to be a foreign devil by policemen no more (or less) British than he but for the pallor of their skin. Amid the menagerie of monsters created by the police, he himself begins to undertake a quite literal demonisation, and Gibreel's 'cockroach dung'-smelling breath becomes his own sulphurous odour. Rushdie is a master of allegory, and I love this book too much to tell you anything more about the somewhat fantastic events that follow, but let me humbly suggest you watch for wax.

Countries like Britain and Spain have already seen the effects of what is being called 'homegrown terrorism' with the bombings in London and Madrid, and the arrests of the 17 individuals the RCMP has alleged were 'inspired by al Qaeda' demonstrates the government's efforts to prevent similar tragedies here. But what seems clear is that feelings of marginalisation and exclusion can have a large role to play in the 'radicalisation' of youth and their susceptibility to identifying with violent extemists. Backlashes against Muslims in Canada as a whole, such at the vandalisation of the mosque in Rexdale, can only make this problem worse, and as determined as the Canadian government is to address the issue of terrorism by force, the real work we have before us is creating a tolerant, inclusive society that addresses the fundamental grievances of marginalised groups. Will we build bridges or fences (or, perhaps, security walls)?

I cannot do this book justice in one breath, and I may revisit it again later. Rushdie is a controversial, sometimes incendiary figure, and The Satanic Verses is a complex novel that may, and has indeed in the past, offended many for what has sometimes been construed as a blasphemous portrayal of Islam. Yet I believe this novel opens the door to a series of very different questions of identity and belonging, and about the long journey to answering what we are, where we have come from, and perhaps most importantly, what we will become.

He writes, 'The real language problem: how to bend it, how to let it be our freedom, how to repossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood: about all that you haven't got a clue... Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.'

Labels: books