Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 125
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 125 to have a theory that anything that is un-British in its outlook must be un-cultured : ‘Yet immediately an ethnic minority complains, they (British political and cultural establishment) are willing to have our reading dictated by the tastes of non-English speaking Muslims, many of them not long out of the villages of Bangladesh. ’ He also talks arrogantly about the Western culture ‘that has evolved in Britain over the past 1,000 years’ and boasts that ‘the cul- ture that embraces a parliamentary democracy, in which the values of freedom, justice, fairness and toleration are pre-eminent’ must be ‘better than one which enjoins the burning of books, that passes a death sentence on a man for having unorthodox views. ’ His attack on Islam is complete when he concludes his article with defamatory remarks about some of the laws of Sharia, much in the same way that Salman Rushdie has presented in his novels : ‘There is nothing in logic or morality that says we must accept it is permissible for a man to have several wives, that animals should be ritually slaughtered, that young girls be circumcised, and women be treated as chattels. Once we go down that road, we will quickly arrive at the market square where criminals are flogged, adulterers are stoned to death and thieves have their hands chopped off. ’ Kilroy-Silk has over-generalised and misrepresented facts de- liberately to add sensationalism to his article and has certainly con- fused religion with culture. He talks about British culture over the past 1,000 years that he is so proud of. Without a doubt, there have been commendable eras of British culture some of which still prevail, but Mr. Kilroy- Silk should also be aware that a lot of what has happened in those 1,000 years does not bear thinking about; for example, in matters relating to blasphemy, book-burning and the like, it is the Christian nations that had been in the forefront, not just in the past 1,000 but