15 August 2022
What we are talking about here is the freedom of thought, speech and assembly, which is the motor of progress let's also remember that we are talking about a death threat to a citizen of the US and UK and an attempt at his execution on American soil. Someone ironically, we are also talking about a Salmon Rushdie who is very quick to criticise white society and yet in this situation where his life is threatened ,he seeks the help and support of the very society he criticises.
Salman Rushdie observes that " a new world has been invented to allow the blind to remain blind: islamophobia (a fear of Islam). To criticise the militancy of that religion in its current manifestation is considered fanaticism: a position taken by someone who is in error and not the system of religion itself
"A new word has been coined to allow blind people to stay blind: islamophobia (a fear of Islam). To criticize the militant violence of this religion in its contemporary international incarnation, is considered as being fanaticism, an extreme position taken by a phobic and irrational person. So it is this person who is at fault and not a police system that has claimed over a billion in debt across the world."
As far as I can understand, the reason for the fatwa against him was that he said that religious texts should be open to change: in other words, that you can edit and update the Quran, for example.
Being able to edit the Quran is an example of free speech, a value we in the west hold dear. Free speech is how we make progress because there is always a dialogue, this is the importance of freedom of assembly, sometimes even an internal dialogue between two halves of our own self, and questions are raised by one half and answered by another, and this dialogue raises new questions and new answers are found... and so on. It's a kind of Hegelian dialectic.
It's in this way that we adapt to a changing world and make progress - free speech and assembly from freedom of thought, where the perimeters of our dialogue are only drawn by our vocabulary, our cultural limits ("the box"), and our childhood formatting (The "script" of our life, written for us by early childhood, as observed by Eric Berne amongst many ... if only we could edit *that* script!) We are not limted by a "thought police" or external agent.
Thought police resume the dialogue in to one side that is correct and the other side that is not and they attempt to silence or cancel the incorrect side by the use of terror.
But I cannot at all see why you would need to go in on edit and change the actual words of the prophet or for that matter the words in any of the other sacred texts. They are written in such a way that their truths are general and universal and offer guidance, or cover, any particular circumstance you find yourself in. It is quite easy to refer to the text and interpret it in the light of this situation or that, in a changing world.
In other words, these texts and any great works of literature contain absolute and universal truths that can be quoted and used to understand particular circumstances.
If you were to edit them, or edit Shakespeare for that matter, and make them time- or situation-dependent, then you would take away the universal and absolute nature of their truths - why would you want to do that?
