ARGUABLY, no single figure has played a more dramatic part in recent British religious history than Sir Salman Rushdie. He notched up his second appearance on Desert Island Discs (Radio 4, Sunday), 37 years after first being a castaway, in the month when The Satanic Verses was first published and not yet controversial, with Sue Lawley. Both appearances are available on iPlayer.
Lauren Laverne’s gentle Mackem tones guided Sir Salman through a life that began in a secular Muslim home, in a very secular post-Independence Bombay, when few would have believed that the future might contain resurgent religious fundamentalisms. A scholarship to Rugby — an application driven by “some spirit of adventure” — radically changed his life, although he encountered racist bullying that he kept quiet about. At first, Sir Salman worked as an advertising copywriter, until a successful second novel, Midnight’s Children, allowed him to become a full-time writer.
The fatwa from Tehran came five months after the publication of The Satanic Verses, after which Sir Salman found a string of British public figures — among them Germaine Greer, John Berger, and politicians from Norman Tebbit to Keith Vaz — condemning him, instead of condemning the Ayatollah Khomeini. Yet, publishing the novel remains one of his life’s most “joyful experiences”. Fans still today tell him of their appreciation of it.
Political changes in Iran and a move to New York allowed Sir Salman to resume a normal life, until, when about to start a lecture at an upstate New York college, in 2022, he was stabbed by a young man (News, 19 August 2022). But it was not Islamic fundamentalism that provoked Sir Salman recently to declare that “freedom of expression in the West is at a critical juncture.” He was overtly critical of a censorious culture obsessed with representation, creating a “timid time where people are afraid . . . of saying something they’re not allowed to say”.
Does the UK Supreme Court striking down Northern Ireland’s ecumenically agreed but Christian-focused RE curriculum as unlawful have implications for schools on the other side of the Irish Sea? Sunday (Radio 4) explored the implications of a case brought after a non-religious Belfast couple noticed that their primary-school-aged daughter was saying prayers before meals at home and asking them questions about God.
The court found that the Northern Ireland religious-education curriculum amounted to indoctrination, but explicitly it permitted Christian-centred RE and collective worship.
Fiona Moss, of Culham St Gabriel’s Trust, welcomed this “important” judgment. She noted that the other three UK jurisdictions had either recently reviewed, or were currently reviewing, their RE curricula, and, given that the system in England was so different from Northern Ireland’s, she thought it entirely possible for it to remain within the “objective, critical, and plural” framework set out by the Supreme Court.