5. Blasphemy and minorities

‘Blasphemy and minorities’ describes how ideas about blasphemy have changed with the increasingly visible presence of religious and ethnic minorities. Modern blasphemy laws tended to limit blasphemy to a crime that could only be committed by those educated as Christians against Christianity—with the result that Jews could not blaspheme, nor could Judaism be blasphemed against. Nevertheless, ‘Jews’ have been very present as images in blasphemy controversies. Today it is also very common for blasphemy to be represented as a Muslim problem. The first modern ‘blasphemous’ cartoon of Muhammad and Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988), as well as the Danish Cartoon Affair of 2005/2006, are fascinating examples of blasphemy and creativity.

Worktown and Muslims

In the 1930s, Bolton was the site of Mass Observation’s first major research project, and subsequent restudies allow us to track in detail the decline of Christianity in the town. It was also the site of the first major Muslim demonstration against Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The reaction of Boltonians to Islam is discussed as an introduction to wider consideration of the impact of the growth of Islam in Britain. Detailed discussion of media coverage of Muslims and of attitude survey data makes the case that, while some British people dislike Islam, a more powerful trend is growing hostility to any religion that is taken seriously enough to intrude on the public sphere.

L’altro non sono io

Through the analysis of some texts recently published in English, this chapter aims to analyse the recent academic debate in the English-speaking world on the role of identity in the growth of consensus and diffusion of populist parties and movements. The first part of this study reconstructs the origins of the so-called identity politics, starting from the movements for the recognition of the 1980s and in particular from protests against the publication of the book The Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie; the second part analyses the meaning of identity and the related concept of identity politics; the third part deals with some aspects of identity politics today and how the academic debate uses the category of white identity in relation to current populist politics; the chapter concludes with some critical reflections both on the use of the category of identity politics and on an interpretation of identity as a monolithic and homogeneous entity.

State Sponsored Literature

Debates about the value of the ‘literary’ rarely register the expressive acts of state subsidy, sponsorship, and cultural policy that have shaped post-war Britain. In State Sponsored Literature, Asha Rogers argues that the modern state was a major material condition of literature, even as its efforts were relative, partial, and prone to disruption. Drawing from neglected and occasionally unexpected archives, she shows how the state became an integral and conflicted custodian of literary freedom in the postcolonial world as beliefs about literature’s ‘public’ were radically challenged by the unrivalled migration to Britain at the end of Empire. State Sponsored Literature retells the story of literature’s place in modern Britain through original analysis of the institutional forces behind canon-formation and contestation, from the literature programmes of the British Council and Arts Council to the UK’s fraught relations with UNESCO, from GCSE literature anthologies to the origins of The Satanic Verses in migrant Camden. The state did not shape literary production in a vacuum, Rogers argues, rather its policies, practices, and priorities were inexorably shaped in turn. Demonstrating how archival work can potentially transform our understanding of literature and its reading publics, this book challenges how we think about literature’s value by asking what state involvement has meant for writers, readers, institutions, and the ideal of autonomy itself.

The Satanic Verses and the State (II)

This second chapter on The Satanic Verses considers the collision between the novel’s anti-statist energies and Rushdie’s increasing dependency on the Thatcher government after the fatwa, an unlikely custodian of literary freedom at the end of the Cold War. It then turns to the precise ways the state offered Rushdie protection, focusing on the anachronistic stipulations in English common law restricting the crime of blasphemy to the Church of England debated in the legal cases against the novel in the UK and in Europe. The second half revisits the secular foundations of the British legal system, considering the alternative stance on free expression in diverse societies adopted in British India and Bhikhu Parekh’s communitarian alternative to the individualism of British liberalism.