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Booker Prize winning novelist Salman Rushdie has condemned "the mangling of language which makes possible the creation of tyranny", identifying in particular the language of religion - and within that, elements of Islam - as having been "horribly mangled in our time".
Delivering the PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture 2014 this evening (9th October), Rushdie said: "It’s fair to say that more than one religion deserves scrutiny. Christian extremists in the United States today attack women’s liberties and gay rights in language they claim comes from God. Hindu extremists in India today are launching an assault on free expression and trying, literally, to rewrite history, proposing the alteration of school textbooks to serve their narrow saffron dogmatism.
"But the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam, and much of it has its roots in the ideological language of blood and war emanating from the Salafist movement within Islam, globally backed by Saudi Arabia."
Rushdie said that the language of the modern world, with its emphasis on liberty and inclination to secularism, had been "targeted by the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry."
"This language, which has been dubbed 'jihadi-cool', is being heard, more and more, in mosques and on social media, and for some young men its appeal is so great that it persuades hundreds, perhaps thousands of British Muslims to join the decapitating barbarians of ISIS," he said, rebutting the term "Islamophobia" as often "coined to discredit those who point at these excesses by labelling them as bigots."
The writer, who spent years in hiding following the 1989 Iranian fatwa requiring his execution for his authorship of novel The Satanic Verses, was speaking in the wider context of the reading of fiction, and the pressure to reduce fiction to literal interpretations, and being "about" something, rather than allowing for multiple, pleasurable readings according to the imaginations of its readers.
"I always believed that the book is completed by the reader that out of the intimacy of strangers created by the act of reading emerges the book as it exists for that reader, and that out of that private act of union comes love, the love of literature, of reading, of that particular book," he said. "Why would one want to prescribe a reading by saying, this is what I meant, and interfere with that beautiful commingling of imaginations? Well, because everyone wants you to."
Rushdie delivered his address as he accepted the 2014 PEN/Pinter Prize, which is awarded annually to a British writer or writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit, who, in the words of Pinter’s Nobel Prize in Literature speech, casts an “unflinching, unswerving” gaze upon the world and shows a “fierce intellectual determination...to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’’.
The British winner shares the prize with an international writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety. Rushdie chose Syrian journalist, lawyer and human rights defender Mazen Darwish; Darwish wins the International Writer of Courage Award in recognition of his fight for civil rights and freedom of expression in Syria.
Zaher Omareen, a Syrian researcher and writer, formally accepted the prize on behalf of Darwish, who is currently imprisoned for charges of "publicising terrorist acts" under Syria’s Anti-Terrorism Law.
Darwish is the founding president of the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression (SCM), which was founded in 2004 to promote freedom of opinion and expression and has documented the human rights abuses taking place in Syria since the uprising began in 2011. He was arrested on 16th February 2012 alongside bloggers and fellow SCM members. If convicted of the charges against him, he faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years.
Rushdie said: “Mazen Darwish courageously fought for civilised values - free expression, human rights - in one of the most dangerous places in the world. His continued detention is arbitrary and unjust. He should be freed immediately, and we must hope this award may help, by shining a light on his plight.”
Lady Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter’s widow, added: “There could not be a more appropriate and deserving choice in view of the current situation in Syria, one that speaks directly to the ideals of PEN.”