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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
February 12, 2006
A letter
This is a letter to an old friend, whose identity I have concealed because he asked me to conceal it. Needless to say, I wouldn’t run it here, were I not hoping it might be read by others -- including some a long distance away.* We are brothers, you and I, Rahim -- as you used to say -- and must be, for we are both journalists, both publicly committed to the same old weatherbeaten ideals of our youth -- to truth, justice, and “the occasional belly laugh”. And after all these years, we still get threats from the same sort of people. You are a faithful Muslim still, though you say you are slacking; I have become more and more a practising Christian. But we are equally unusual in the “rag trade” for having always taken religion seriously. Now, it seems, the world is finally taking religion seriously, and we are in bigger trouble than ever. I’m writing, of course, about what we have called, between us, “The Battle of Khartoon” -- over a few drawings in an obscure Danish newspaper. It is now raging in streets across the Old World, and sending up flares in the New. Your position is more delicate than mine. As you say, you would probably be lynched if you wrote, however calmly, what you truly believe. Though since I received my own splash of publicity from the trolls at Al-Jazeera, last week, I rather wonder how far I am behind you. Twenty-seven years ago, as Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran, the first “Islamist” regime since the foundation of Saudi Arabia, you said it was a good thing. Islam had to find its way into a new balance between “piety” and “modernity”, and the Persians were just the civilized people to find this way. I agreed we needed both piety and modernity, in East as in West, but held little hope for “a new balance” from the ayatollahs of Iran. I reminded that many welcomed Lenin as a “reformer”, then Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot. But these, you said, were all atheists; they did not have the conscience of an ancient and honourable religion to restrain them. In time we both came to see that Revolutionary Iran was a new and vicious engine of totalitarianism. And you called it, “heretical to Islam”. As you know, my own formative political experience, though I did not entirely appreciate it at the time, happened at the age of seven. It was being wheeled home from school in Lahore, by our servant on his bicycle, around the long perimeter of a riot, and seeing blood in the streets and ditches. It is an experience that has always haunted me, and it returns whenever I see men, of any religious or political persuasion, imposing their views by intimidation. There is no excuse for it. I am appalled to read that you now think those Danish cartoons were an excuse, because they “insulted Islam” to such a degree. To find you have forgotten what you used to know perfectly well -- that in the West, governments are not responsible for what the papers print. We once struggled together to advance this “universal principle” of a free press, against the power of a Third World state to licence and censor. You agree that the rioting and arson are “excessive”. But who will declare even this, if not you? Not you, because, in “the present climate”, you are afraid of “what might happen”, not only to you but to your family. And I know you are not alone in this, that so many Muslim journalists share in both your views, and your fate. That even in “liberal” Jordan, editors have been sacked, then jailed, merely for advocating reason and sanity. And now the final straw: I cannot condemn you for this. I can only observe who has won, and who has lost, our old, our common, battle for human freedom. You know of my experience in studying, once, the extraordinary dome of the Qa’it-Bey, in Cairo -- my sense of having grasped, in the tracery, what is most exalted and noble in Islam -- the glorious vision of a pure monotheism, “before all worlds”. And how I felt able, in a moment, to read in the holy scrawl upon that dome, what our Christian poet Dante called, “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Adhere to that, and we will find a way forward. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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