BOUNDARIES OF TOLERATION

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND PUBLIC LIFE

Religion, Culture, and Public Life

SERIES EDITORS

Alfred Stepan and Mark C. Taylor

THE RESURGENCE OF RELIGION calls for careful analysis and constructive criticism of new forms of intolerance, as well as new approaches to tolerance, respect, mutual understanding, and accommodation. In order to promote serious scholarship and informed debate, the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life and Columbia University Press are sponsoring a book series devoted to the investigation of the role of religion in society and culture today. This series includes works by scholars in religious studies, political science, history, cultural anthropology, economics, social psychology, and other allied fields whose work sustains multidisciplinary and comparative as well as transnational analyses of historical and contemporary issues. The series focuses on issues related to questions of difference, identity, and practice within local, national, and international contexts. Special attention is paid to the ways in which religious traditions encourage conflict, violence, and intolerance and also support human rights, ecumenical values, and mutual understanding. By mediating alternative methodologies and different religious, social, and cultural traditions, books published in this series will open channels of communication that facilitate critical analysis.

After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, edited by Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen

Religion and International Relations Theory, edited by Jack Snyder

Religion in America: A Political History, Denis Lacorne

Democracy, Islam, and Secularism in Turkey, edited by Ahmet T. Kuru and Alfred Stepan

Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys, Barney, Turrell, Goldsworthy, Mark C. Taylor

Tolerance, Democracy, and Sufis in Senegal, edited by Mamadou Diouf

Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo, Mark C. Taylor

Democracy and Islam in Indonesia, edited by Mirjam Künkler and Alfred Stepan

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference, edited by Linell E. Cady and Tracy Fessenden

Recovering Place: Reflections on Stone Hill, Mark C. Taylor

BOUNDARIES OF TOLERATION

Edited by

ALFRED STEPAN

and

CHARLES TAYLOR

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53633-2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boundaries of toleration / edited by Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor.

pages cm. — (Religion, culture, and public life)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16566-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-16567-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53633-2

1. Toleration—Philosophy. 2. Group identity 3. Social values I. Stepan, Alfred C.

HM1271.B68 2014

179’ 9—dc23

2013025560

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

JACKET DESIGN: Archie Ferguson

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To Mark Kingdon, who made these conversations possible.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Alfred Stepan and Charles Taylor

RELIGION AND THE IMAGINATION

Salman Rushdie with Gauri Viswanathan

PART 1

CLASSICAL WESTERN APPROACHES TO TOLERATION

A FORM OF LIBERTY AND INDULGENCE: Toleration as a Layered Institution

Ira Katznelson

HOW TO DEFINE SECULARISM

Charles Taylor

SECULARISM: Its Content and Context

Akeel Bilgrami

HALF-TOLERATION: Concordia and the Limits of Dialogue

Nadia Urbinati

PART 2

BEFORE AND BEYOND CLASSICAL APPROACHES TO TOLERATION

BEYOND TOLERATION: Civility and Principled Coexistence in Ashokan Edicts

Rajeev Bhargava

EMPIRE AND TOLERATION: A Comparative Sociology of Toleration Within Empire

Karen Barkey

MODERNITY, STATE, AND TOLERATION IN INDIAN HISTORY: Exploring Accommodations and Partitions

Sudipta Kaviraj

MUSLIMS AND TOLERATION: Unexamined Contributions to the Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democracies

Alfred Stepan

Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

ALFRED STEPAN AND CHARLES TAYLOR

HOW CAN PEOPLE of diverse religious, historical, ethnic, and linguistic allegiances and identities live together? And that means: without violence and without the domination of some by others, without inflicting suffering on each other? This is certainly one of our major preoccupations today. But it has recurrently preoccupied people and societies throughout history. Even when domination of some by others was considered normal and inevitable, rulers often tried to avoid its more brutal forms.

To help us begin our reconsideration of toleration in the widest possible way, we invited Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize–winning novelist of Midnight’s Children, to inaugurate our deliberations. Rushdie has lived with, and thought profoundly about, religion and the boundaries that demarcate intolerance from tolerance, and even those that cross over beyond tolerance, to mutual respect. Though condemned to death for apostasy by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for his novel Satanic Verses, Rushdie reflects broadly and beautifully over his childhood visits to the mutually tolerant Sufi-Hindu culture of Kashmir and the fact that his father chose the surname Rushdie after Ibn Rush’d, the brilliant twelfth-century scholar known in the West as Averroës, who pioneered nonliteralist interpretations of the Qur’an. Rushdie analyzes why this tradition is now under great attack and suggests how it might be recovered. He uses poetic reflections to illuminate how the great Mughal leader Akbar created a culture of tolerance, and finally mutual respect, that transcended much of his despotic origins. This and much more. Read, enjoy, and reflect.

In the rest of this volume a series of distinguished philosophers, historians, sociologists, and political scientists take up Rushdie’s suggestive challenges. The question they all address is how can people of diverse allegiances and identities live together.

The language in which these questions were thought out in the classical literature of Western civilization was that of toleration. The milestones in what we in the West understand as our progress toward a better form of society, our liberal democracy, were marked by edicts of toleration, by Locke’s Letter on Toleration, by appeals to toleration. This was part of the natural language of human discourse in the West from the sixteenth century onward.

But, recently, the term toleration has come under attack. Many people want to argue, in our multicultural societies today, that we have gone beyond toleration, and that there is something demeaning to the beneficiaries in talk of tolerating this or that group.

In this volume a number of us recognize that the classical argument for toleration implies that the very act of proposing to tolerate a group, or a practice, or a way of life was already to presuppose that there was some problem with this group: they were dangerous or disturbing to social peace or unpleasant or distasteful. Normally, states would take measures to counteract these negative features, perhaps expelling the group or isolating it or forbidding or limiting some of their group practices. However, the state may have decided to forbear from applying these measures, at least to the full extent. Such forbearance is a key part of this literature on toleration.

The possible motives for states and individuals of such toleration are many and multilayered. We may think that forbearance leads to greater social harmony, that it will arouse less conflict, less mutual hostility than taking the road to repression. Or some may argue that a given group is not as dangerous as had been assumed—see Locke’s argument for tolerating dissenters (although not atheists and Catholics). Alternatively, we may tolerate out of compassion or humanitarian feeling.

But in all these cases we are still admitting that there is something wrong with the target group or practice, something which would normally call down on them some negative measures, even though we find reasons to suspend or mitigate these. We can see why the word toleration can offend today, since many of us would like to see ourselves as part of a multicultural, liberal society, where (a) differences—of culture, of religion, of sexual orientation, etc.—are not seen as threats to good order or good taste, but on the contrary as potential enrichment; and thus (b) where immunity to special negative treatment is secured not by arguments mitigating deserved discrimination, but by rights. Measures securing individual rights and forbidding discrimination are inscribed in all the charters that are a fundamental component of contemporary democratic constitution building.

It is clear that the logic of toleration, and that of multicultural rights entrenchment, are quite different from each other. How can anyone say that I am receiving as a fruit of toleration something that I have a right to? We would probably also agree that a politics of rights is a more satisfactory arrangement than a politics of tolerance. It is more in keeping with human dignity when we are insured against special negative treatment by right, rather than by the wisdom of governments or majorities who may see good reasons to mitigate this treatment in our case. In that sense, rights take us beyond toleration. However, even though we are happy to analyze politics beyond toleration, we believe that the concept and practice of toleration are both still essential.

Essential, because we can raise the serious question whether we have really succeeded in transcending altogether the logic of toleration, and whether banning the word may not blind us to the case for forbearance in certain situations that still recur. There is a liberal zealotry which can be as short-sighted and inhumane as the other modes—religious, national, ethnic—that we see in history; and many of these older modes can hide themselves in liberal garb. The present wave of Islamophobia spreading in the Western world is a good case in point: xenophobic and exclusionary sentiments that give themselves what seem impeccable liberal and feminist credentials can be unleashed without restraint.

These are among the questions that will be discussed in this book. We want both to explore the issues and forms of toleration in different contexts and the real possibilities of going beyond toleration in certain circumstances. Part 1, Classical Western Approaches to Toleration, examines conceptual debates about toleration mainly in the classical Western context. Part 2, Before and Beyond Classical Approaches to Toleration, documents some largely unexplored variants of toleration in non-Western cultures, some of which predate classical Western arguments about toleration and some of which go beyond toleration to mutual respect practiced well before the creation of modern multiculturalism in the West.

Part 1 opens with a penetrating study by Ira Katznelson, called A Form of Liberty and Indulgence: Toleration as a Layered Institution, of the logic of toleration and of the different sites and configurations that it has assumed in Western history. It also contains a warning against too quickly assuming that we have transcended the need for such tolerance. The next two chapters are a debate about secularism and its relationship to toleration between Charles Taylor and Akeel Bilgrami. Charles Taylor, in his chapter How to Define Secularism, offers a reconceptualization of secularism for the new era of multiculturalism, that is, for societies which contain major religious and cultural differences, but which claim to go beyond toleration in their management of these differences. Akeel Bilgrami follows with Secularism: Its Content and Context, which argues that Taylor’s new definition accommodates multiculturalism so much that it might make it difficult to utilize secularism to condemn, and, indeed, make illegal, some dangerous forms of intolerance. In the final essay in part 1, Half-Toleration: Concordia and the Limits of Dialogue, Nadia Urbinati presents a fascinating historical study of a road not taken. She describes the early post-Reformation notion of Concordia Christiana, which offered a formula for the harmonious coexistence of Christian confessions that did not appeal to toleration, but rather to a humanist ideal of concord drawn from Cicero. Her chapter explains how Concordia did not succeed and why the route out of discord and conflict in the modern European tradition turned out to be that of developing toleration.

Our choice in this volume to look at the world history of toleration in part 2 helps make it absolutely clear that arguments for the use of toleration and its analogues were not, as is often argued, developed first in Western Europe and only then diffused to non-Western cultures. Rajeev Bhargava in his Beyond Toleration: Civility and Principled Coexistence in Asokan Edicts argues that Emperor Asoka, who ruled much of India from 269–232 B.C.E., during a period of internecine religious conflict, helped reduce such sectarian slaughter by installing, in thirty different locations throughout the Indian subcontinent, stone pillars to advance arguments against intolerance and for civility and principled coexistence. For example, Asoka’s Rock Edict VII argues that he wishes members of all faiths to live everywhere in his kingdom. For they all seek mastery of the senses and purity of mind. Rock Edict XII goes beyond the boundaries of seventeenth-century Western ideas of toleration, which imply that a group should be tolerated despite being disliked, by asserting that King Asoka honours men of all faiths. He argues that all faiths deserve respect and that everyone should guard one’s speech to avoid extolling one’s own faith and disparaging the faith of others. . . . . The faiths of others all deserve to be honoured…. Concord alone is commendable, for through concord men may learn and respect the conception of Dharma [faith] accepted by others.

A major task that must be done before toleration can become a powerful conceptual variable in the social sciences is the creation of better analytic categories concerning the boundaries of toleration. The chapter by Karen Barkey, Empire and Toleration: A Comparative Sociology of Toleration Within Empire, pays particular attention to the boundaries between intolerance and tolerance and develops analytic categories of what factors contribute to boundary changes. Barkey poses, and convincingly answers, a fascinating comparative question. Why and how did the Ottoman Empire, which started with greater ideological arguments and governmental mechanisms for toleration of diversity than the Habsburg Empire, with its confessional absolutism, cross paths with the Habsburgs in the eighteenth century, when the Ottomans embarked on a route of intolerance and persecution of the very groups they had gladly tolerated while the Habsburgs declared an Edict of Tolerance?

Sudipta Kaviraj’s chapter, Modernity, State, and Toleration: Exploring Accommodations and Partitions, strongly contests what he considers modern social science’s tendency to view the question of toleration through a simple linear narrative. He also contests the dominant views of many modernist Indian nationalist historians who see Indian history as a chronicle of unceasing religious tension. Kaviraj offers a fundamentally new, nonlinear, history of religious conflict, accommodation, and intermittent periods of tolerance and intolerance over twenty-five hundred years.

In the concluding chapter of the volume, Muslims and Toleration: Unexamined Contributions to the Multiple Secularisms of Modern Democracies, Alfred Stepan subjects the widespread assumption of a democratic deficit in the Muslim world to close empirical examination. He documents that over 400 million Muslims outside of the West actually live in countries normally classified as democracies by both of the two most authoritative annual surveys of democracies in the world. He examines how and why Muslims in Indonesia, Senegal, as well as the 180 million Muslims in democratic India, rejected any early Rawlsian idea of keeping religion out of the political arena. Rather, in a form of cocelebration of all religions, and policy cooperation with secular authorities, Muslims helped craft new forms of democracy and toleration, adding to the repertoire of the modern world’s multiple democratic secularisms. In Indonesia these practices have led to 97 percent of boys between the ages of thirteen and eighteen being literate and 96 percent of the girls. In India, in a survey of 27,000 respondents, 71 percent of Hindus and 71 percent of Muslims affirmed that democracy is always preferable. The same survey documented the counterintuitive finding that, for Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs, the greater the intensity of religious practice, the greater the intensity of support for democracy. Fortunately, there are more routes out of intolerance and toward toleration and democracy than standard accounts of secularism normally recognize.

RELIGION AND THE IMAGINATION

SALMAN RUSHDIE WITH GAURI VISWANATHAN

Below is an edited transcript from the public discussion Rushdie had with Gauri Viswanathan, Class of 1933 Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, on the occasion of the launch of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, November 6, 2008, at Columbia University.

GAURI VISWANTHAN:  It’s a real pleasure to be here with you, Salman. Thank you for joining us in the launch of the institute and I want very much to thank Nick Dirks and Mark Taylor for inviting me to be a part of this conversation. Salman, your novels team with stories within stories that get at different levels of religious experience, and you often turn to myth, miracles, and magic to reflect on that experience. Let me begin by asking a simple question, not about religion and the imagination, the title of this session, but about religion as imagination. If, as could be argued, conceptualizing an unseen power inherently involves human imaginings of the divine, what does the literary imagination add? Or what work does it do that is different from the religious imagination? Do you see yourself trying to recover, through literature, the impulses of a religious imagination before it freezes into theology, before experience turns into a theological, ethical construct?

SALMAN RUSHDIE:  Well, the first thing to say is that all literature began as sacred literature. That is to say, the beginnings of writings are religious, that the oldest written material that we have is all the product of one or another religious experience. It’s a long time, if you look at the history of literature, before literature separates itself from that articulation of religion. So there is something profound in the origins that link them.

The other thing is that religious language has had such a powerful effect, I think, on all of us, whether we are religious or not, that there aren’t words to express some things except religious words. For instance, if you think about a word like the soul, what does that mean if you are not a religious person? I don’t believe in an afterlife or a heaven or a hell and so on, and yet I feel that when I use that word it has some meaning. What could that meaning possibly be? There isn’t a secular word for that feeling that we are not only flesh and blood, that there is, as Arthur Koestler, said a ghost in the machine. Whether you are religious or not, you feel obliged to use language that has been shaped by religion in order to express things that may not have a religious purpose. So that’s a constant battle. But I think you are right to say that I’m not interested in devotion, and in that sense I’m not interested in writing books that express anything other than interhuman devotion, which is temporary.

VISWANATHAN:  At the same time, I’ve read several writings of yours where you talk about both the beauty and the terror of religion, the ability of religion to inspire profound feelings of great beauty and majesty as well as to incite great bloodshed.

RUSHDIE:  Yes, I was being polite.

VISWANATHAN:  But I remember that you wrote this very evocative passage—I think this was when you were in King’s College. You had gone to give a talk and you spoke about the architecture …

RUSHDIE:  Yes, that’s true. You know, I grew up as a student looking out of my window at King’s College chapel, and it’s hard not to believe in the capacity of religion to create beauty when King’s College chapel is outside your window, this exquisite thing. Then I was asked to speak there, and one of the things that I thought would never happen to me in my life is that I would deliver the sermon in King’s College chapel. There are moments when your life surprises you.

And I have to tell you, apropos of nothing, I learned from doing that why priests speak the way they do. It’s because of the echo. They said to me, You know, it’s ninety-two feet high, it’s stone, there is no carpet, and if you speak in an ordinary speaking voice then your echo comes back at you and no one can hear a word you are saying. And—so you have to—speak—like this. You have to say—what you have to say—in this way. And suddenly you understand how preachers do it, and it’s because of the echo. There is a metaphor lurking in there somewhere.

VISWANATHAN:  So do you see something about aesthetics that does have that religious sensibility?

RUSHDIE:  Yes, what I’m saying is, I think there are different ways of getting there. It’s quite clear that religion has inspired people to create things of incredible beauty and also that people of no religion have created things of incredible beauty. So there is nothing intrinsic about religion that makes it the way of getting there, but it is a way of getting there. I think it’s true that you can listen to great religious music, for example, you can look at icon painting, you can read Milton or Blake, and you can easily see the power of religious belief to create or to help to create beauty. And for me the great, the most useful thing has been the power of religion to create very strong metaphors. I’ve gone back often to what I call dead religions, what’s more commonly called mythology. But remember that the great Greek myths were once the religion of Greece, and Roman mythology was once the religion of Rome. It had all the apparatus of priests and anathemas and so on to defend it. Now that it doesn’t have that, we can simply look at it as text and, of course, you find in these stories astonishing amounts of meaning compressed into very, very small amounts of words.

When I was writing The Ground Beneath Her Feet, for example, I was studying the Orpheus myth. Now, you can express the whole story of Orpheus and Eurydice in less then one hundred words. It doesn’t really require more than five or six, what, ten sentences maybe, and yet the amount of complexity pushed into that very small story is almost inexhaustible. You have this very complex examination of the relationship between love, art, and death, and you can turn it this way and that way. You can say that this story tells us—shows us—the power of art inspired by love to overcome death. Or, if you are feeling more pessimistic, it can show us the power of death to destroy love, even when love is guided by art.

There isn’t a single reading; there are many readings. That’s something that living religions also have in common. There is not a single way of reading the text; there are very rich and complex ways of reading these texts. If you’re in the text business, you’re very interested to see how much power can be concentrated in how little in these ancient works. So it’s been very important for me to examine that.

VISWANATHAN:  In fact, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is the novel I wanted to talk about a little bit. You have pairs of contrasting characters in this novel such as the ultrarationalist Sir Darius and the miracle-chasing wife, Lady Spenta. For Sir Darius, every intellectual effort begins with the death of the gods, and he seeks out a secular origin prior to all religion, whereas his wife searches for enchantment. And in The Enchantress of Florence, your most recent novel, you have Akbar as a modern man who questions the existence of God and presides over spirited debates in the tent of the new worship between competing philosophical schools. Yet the same rationalist skeptic has created his imaginary Queen Jodha, and he lives in a world steeped in magic and miracles. So I wanted to ask you how you reconcile these two images cohabiting the same world, these super-rationalist figures who are highly skeptical and who privilege human effort over religion and yet, at the same time, are encompassed by this world of miracles and magic.

RUSHDIE:  Yes, I don’t reconcile them. That’s the thing: I just allow them go on arguing inside me as well as outside. It’s true that if you are involved in the making of imaginative writing there is a powerful argument implicit in what you are doing against pure rationalism, because what you are doing often is not reasonable. The way in which a story is created or an imaginative piece comes to life, there is a mystery in it, and you can’t deny that is so. There is a bit of me—I guess the bit of me that is sitting here—that is quite rationalistic. I would argue, not unconventionally, that religion comes after reason and that, actually, religious texts were invented by people and that gods, indeed, were invented by human beings in order to answer the two great questions of life, Where do we come from? and How should we live? It seems as if every religion is based on an attempt to answer those questions, the question of origin and the question of ethics.

I would say, and I have often said, that I don’t need religion to answer either of those questions. Because, on the question of origins, the one thing you can say about every religion ever invented is that they are wrong. The world was not created in six days by a sky god who rested on the seventh; the world was not created by the churning of primal material in a giant pot; the world was not created by the sparks unleashed by the friction of the udders of a gigantic cow against the boulders of a bottomless chasm. All these things might be pretty, but they are not true. And so it seems to me that religion just has nothing to say on the question of origins. And on the question on ethics, it seems to me that whenever religion has got into the driving seat on that question, what happens is inquisition and oppression.

So it seems to me not just uninteresting, but not valuable to turn to religion. I don’t want the answers to come from some priest. I would prefer them to come from this, from the process of debate and argument and the kind of thing for which this institute has been set up. Actually, the first thing you accept in that situation is that there are no answers. There isn’t an answer; there is only the debate. The debate itself is the thing from which flows the ethical life. So that is what I would say, and that is what I think. But when I’m writing, something weird happens, and the result is these books, which clearly do contain a large amount of what you would call supernaturalism. I find that as a writer I need that in order to explain the world I am writing about. As a person I don’t need it, but as a writer I do. So that tension is just there. I can’t reconcile it, it is just so.

VISWANATHAN:  I’m very interested in what you just said now about debate and argument as being part of the formation of religion. I remember in an earlier conversation we had, when we talked about The Satanic Verses, you said that you were attempting to depict the convulsions that take place at the birth of any new religion, which you described as a history often marked by discord and disagreement. You had said, and I quote, "There are scenes in The Satanic Verses in which the early religion is persecuted and early members of the religion are verbally and physically abused by the mob in the city now called Mecca, and some of that abuse is there in the novel and some of these sentences were taken out as my abusive view of Islam. Then you ask, If you’re going to make a portrayal of the attacks on a newborn faith, how can you do it without showing the attackers doing the attacking? If then those attacks are made into your view, it is a distortion."

So I think your observation about religious debates of the past being turned into contemporary heresies goes right to the heart of the problem that those writing religious histories have, of always having to contend with mainstream accounts. Your effort, as far as I can tell, has been to depict alternative histories, with stories and traditions not represented in mainstream history. So it raises a very important point about the difficulties of representing religious debates when those arguments might have been effaced from the historical record or exist only as fragments, leaving traces on various textual traditions, which are then reconstituted as sacred traditions. In bringing that suppressed religious history of dissent, disagreement, and disputation back to the forefront of our consciousness, do you think that writers almost inevitably end up participating in those debates? Or do you think a reasonable distance can be maintained? What you said in that earlier conversation was that what you were trying to do in depicting the early history of Islam was turned into your heretical pronouncement, and you were trying to emphasize that distinction.

RUSHDIE:  Yes, I think that it ought to be possible simply to say, This is something like what might have happened at the beginning, at the birth of this religion. It ought to be possible to say that, neutrally, without seeming to be on one side or another. Clearly, what happened in the case of The Satanic Verses was that there was an assumption that I was on one side rather than the other and that, therefore, my meaning should be found in the hostility rather than in the defense. It’s a shame that’s what happened, but it is what happened. I think, on the whole, it must be possible in any open society to discuss openly how things happen. I think it’s a great shame in the world of Islam that so much interesting contemporary scholarship about the origins of Islam is not acceptable. And the reason it’s not acceptable is because of the insistence on the divine origin of the text.

Now, if you insist that the text is the uncreated word of God, then presumably the social and economic conditions of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century after Christ are not important, because God operates on a larger canvas than that. If, however, you are willing to historicize the text and to look at its creation as an event inside history rather than above history, then immediately what we know about the history of the period opens up and illuminates the text. I think one of the scholarly tragedies, right now, is that it’s not really acceptable to do this inside much of the Muslim world.

To give just one example, in the Qur’an, the Bible stories are strangely varied from the versions that exist in the Old and New Testaments so that in the chapter of the Qur’an called Miriam, which is about the birth of Christ, Christ is born in an oasis in a desert under a palm tree. Now, the reason for this is clear. Allow me to historicize for a moment: The prophet did not begin to prophesy until he was over forty years old, and before that he had a long period as a traveling merchant, a very successful one. On those journeys, at oases and at way stations he would have met the only Christians who were present in the Arabian Peninsula at the time, who were Nestorian Christians. And Nestorian Christianity made local variations, local adaptations of Bible stories, so, in fact, the story about Christ being born under a palm tree in an oasis is a Nestorian story. It existed in the Nestorian tradition before the Qur’an, and the version in the Qur’an is more or less identical to that. So immediately you can see that this version arrives the way it does in this text because of the life experience of this man. But this is something you can’t say because it negates the divine origin of the text.

So this is the problem that is faced. I’ll answer your question about whether one can approach this neutrally, whether one can simply say, This is probably what happened. Even that statement now becomes embattled, because there is already an explanation of how these things happened, and if you try to diverge from that explanation you are seen as the bad guy. I have often spoken about Ibn Rush’d; maybe I should slightly rehearse that again, because I am not really called Rushdie. My father made up the name. My grandfather was called Muhammadin Halifid Elvi because he came from Delhi, but my father decided that was too much of a mouthful and so he invented Rushdie. The reason he invented it was because he was an admirer of the philosopher Ibn Rush’d, known to the West as Averroës. And I grew up with this accidental message, or this message in a bottle, from my father, which was contained in my surname. So, at a certain point, I had to find out about Ibn Rush’d, and it’s very interesting that he was one of the people who, in the twelfth century, tried to fight the literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and did so with great brilliance and scholarship and, as we can now see from the history of the world, lost that battle. But one of the arguments he made I have always found to be very beautiful, and so I offer it.

He said that if you look at the Judeo-Christian definition of God it differs from the Muslim definition in one important particular, which is that the Jews and Christians say that man was created by God in his own image. What that sentence clearly suggests is that there is some relationship between the nature of man and the nature of God, created in his own image. Islam says the opposite, that God has no human qualities. In fact, it suggests that it would demean God to suggest that He had anything as minor as a human quality. He has divine qualities. And so Ibn Rush’d argued that language, also, is a human quality, and, therefore, it was unreasonable to expect or suggest that God spoke Arabic, because God presumably spoke God. As a result, even if you believe the story literally, when the archangel appears on the mountain and delivers the message to the prophet, he, understanding it in Arabic, is already making an active interpretation. He is already taking something which arrives in nonlinguistic form and misunderstanding it linguistically—something which arrives as a divine message which he is transforming into human comprehension.

So it was argued that if the original act of receiving the text is already an act of interpretation, then further interpretation is clearly legitimate. That was his attempt, I think probably the most brilliant attempt, to destroy the power of literalism from inside the text, and from inside what is already said and accepted. Well, that didn’t work, unfortunately, though I wouldn’t mind having another go. Because it is true, and it is very sad, that of all the great world religions this is the one which is born entirely inside recorded history. We really know what was happening at the time, and so it’s the one that can be studied as an event inside history, as an economic, social, cultural, political, world historic event. It’s actually not difficult to see the ways the conditions of the time impinge upon the Qur’an as a text and help to shape it, and it’s a tragedy that you’re not allowed to do that. I guess I tried to do that and there were people who disapproved.

VISWANATHAN:  Then, would you say, that literature is probably one of the most effective mediums for historicizing religion, especially for its early formations, one which can, as you say, put the spotlight on religion as recorded history?

RUSHDIE:  Well, it’s a way of getting people to read it. More people read novels than scholarly texts. I’m sorry to say that in this room, but it’s true. Of course, a