Why Salman Rushdie deserves a knighthood

I first came across Rushdie's writings and the power of his words to move the reader in the book that propelled him into literary stardom: 'Midnight's Children'. I felt moved, humbled and informed in equal parts and in that volume Rushdie became one of the greatest ambassadors for India and Pakistan explaining cultural differences without sinking into the debasement of exegesis, contrasting the East and the West in such stark, yet gentle terms that I often, in retrospect felt ashamed not to belong to a culture whose roots went as far back as that.

I loved the 'Satanic Verses' and laughed at the Iranian regime's fatwa except it cost the British tax payer a cool £1 mil a year to protect him. We have come a long way since then, we are in a new century and Rushdie, it seems has lost none of his power to polarise opinion, arising the hatred of the very people who should be supporting him as their ambassador to the West and being liked by those who should be less sympathetic to him.

I am, quite deliberately, going to take a balanced view here, precisely because it will serve to better make the case. Rushdie and his knighthood have become focal points by a chagrined sandal-footed throng (and yep inflammatory imagery is deliberately used here) precisely because it gives focus to their ire against the West (which somehow is held responsible for all the ills they experience at the hands of their own governments and societies).

Religion has always been a powerful focal force. In the West we use to burn apostates and heretics and brand anyone not falling in line as a witch. So in that respect we were no more enlightened than Pakistan is today. But our darkness was over 1000 years ago and we have since come such a long way that Amazon freely sells books like: The case against Christianity and The Atheist Manifesto which takes a remarkably balanced view against all three of the world's religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

What is remarkable here is that goatherds (and please correct me if I am wrong, but sandals and white robes went out of fashion back in King Herod's time) feel so strongly about literature that they are prepared to go to war against the West, threaten acts of terrorism and consider killing a writer.

Either they all possess a remarkable genetic mutation which allows them to appreciate literature to a degree that must be truly remarkable or else they are all a bunch of ignorant fanatics listening to equally ignorant (but far more sly) self-titled clergy which have a hidden agenda and can whip them into a frenzy to suit their own purposes.

In all his writings Rushdie did not ever come near again to the potency of 'Midnight's Children' and yet he has the ability to stir up such passions (which he no doubt revels in) simply because of ignorance, illiteracy and fanaticism, the very things literature is supposed to stand against.

Should people in Pakistan learn to read they will realise that the most effective weapon against a writer is obscurity. Then again, should they learn to read they might take it upon themselves to study the Koran rather than have it read out to them by those who serve not God, but themselves.

Have we got religious zealots in the West? Welllll, looking at the reaction to Gibson's 'Passion of the Christ' should be enough to answer that question. If Islamic countries really want to be taken seriously then they will need to somehow pull themselves up out of the primordial soup where they currently mentally reside and try and reclaim some of the past intellectual glory of the civilization that made inroads in mathematics and medicine the West could only dream about.

Then, and only then, they might command some respect. But until they get to that stage, they will serve only as a reminder that en-mass they hold about as much credibility as last year's zucchini salad (and I am probably doing now a huge disservice to zucchini salads everywhere).