In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 2: Larry David's Finest Hour

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm [S9/E3]

In the long-awaited ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry incurs a death sentence from the Supreme Leader of Iran after satirizing the Ayatollah on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in promotion of his latest project - a musical comedy called Fatwa! - based on The Satanic Verses controversy in which a similar religious ruling was passed against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 [see part one of this post]. 

This, I think, is a brave thing to do - arguably far more daring than his usual schtick of breaching social conventions and examining the micropolitics of every day life in obsessive detail. Brave too, I might add, of HBO to agree to this; for these days there aren't many producers willing to be involved in a project that might offend the religious sensibilities of Islam (they might claim their reticence is a sign of respect, but I think we all know it's a sign of fear).      

Post-The Satanic Verses controversy, post-the murder of Theo van Gogh, post-the Danish cartoon crisis, and post-the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the West has learned to appease Islam and limit its own right to freedom of expression. In other words, fear of deadly reprisals has succeeded in bringing about cultural self-censorship. So again, hats off to Larry David!

And hats off too to Salman Rushdie for not only agreeing to make fun of what was, for many years, a truly horrible situation, but also to take part in an episode of the show, where - to brilliant comic effect - he instructs Larry on all the advantages of living under a fatwa (including fatwa sex, which, according to Rushdie, is the best sex there is). 

As one commentator on this episode pointed out, the reason such jokes constitute one of the most effective weapons against Islamic fundamentalism is precisely because - as Khomeini once said - there's nothing funny about Islam.

The ninth season of Curb met with mixed reviews and audience figures were, I believe, much lower than for season 8. Critics said the world had moved on in the six years between the two seasons and that the show belonged to another time.

Maybe that's true: but, ultimately, what matters is the fact that Larry David, in collaboration with Rushdie, demonstrated how best to respond to those fanatics who would have us all submit to their religious mania: with courage and with humour.      


Click here to watch a scene with Larry David and Salman Rushdie (the self-styled Fatwa Boys) from 'A Disturbance in the Kitchen', episode 3 / season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dir. Jeff Schaffer (HBO, 2017). 

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 1: Remembering the Rushdie Affair

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
Image credit: John P. Johnson / HBO

On Valentine's Day, 1989, when the rest of us were sending flowers to loved ones, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini - decided to issue a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie: a religious decree that urged Muslims around the world to kill the author (and publishers) of The Satanic Verses (1988); for it was a novel that was said to offend the sacred values of Islam.   

This grey-bearded cleric, aged 89, and with only months left to live, added that any good Muslim who was killed trying to carry out the death sentence should be considered a martyr, i.e., one whose place in paradise was guaranteed. Just in case that wasn't a strong enough motivating factor, a $2.8 million bounty was also placed on Rushdie's head.    

The writer was immediately granted police protection by the British government, though many seemed to resent the fact (and the cost to the public purse). Rushdie then spent many years moving between safe houses and living a life in which everyday activities - like kicking a football in the park with his son - became either impossible or subject to tight security measures.

Many Muslim countries around the world banned the import and sale of the book and encouraged violent protests against the West. In Bradford, a mob publicly burned copies of the work and echoed the call for Rushdie's execution. Whilst some authors, including Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe were vocal in their support, others - who shall remain nameless - were noticeably silent on the issue (some even implied that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion).   

It was only in the 1990s that Rushdie was able to gradually recover something approaching a normal life once more, eventually moving to New York. But the threat to his life remained; Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, stated in 2005 that as Rushdie was still an apostate his killing was authorised within Islam and he again stressed the irrevocable nature of the fatwa in 2015.

Thirty years on, not only does Rushdie remain a figure of hate for Islamists across the Muslim world, but the issue of blasphemy - in 2019! - remains an incendiary one; people are still being killed or threatened with death for any perceived insult to God or his prophet Muhammad (the case of Asia Bibi is just the latest grotesque example).   

The problem, of course, is that laws designed to protect religious sensibilities ultimately stifle intellectual debate and artistic expression. Indeed, as Christopher Hitchens notes, the fatwa issued against his friend Rushdie was essentially the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom: after The Satanic Verses controversy came the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004; followed a year later by the Danish cartoon crisis; and then the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 ...

Happily, three decades on, Rushdie is alive and well and - as we'll see in the second part of this post - able to laugh at his own nightmarish experience. Even if, again to quote Hitchens, "the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force".


See: Christopher Hitchens, 'Assassins of the Mind', Vanity Fair (February 2009): click here to read online.

To read part two of this post, click here. 

Rushdie with a copy of his offending text (London, 1989)

Photo credit: PA Photos / Landov 

All Is Forgiven, But Nothing Learnt in The Case of Charlie Hebdo

The so-called survivors' edition of Charlie Hebdo has been published in a print run that numbers in the millions and in several languages, including English and Arabic. What was once a small, struggling, French satirical magazine is now a global phenomenon.

The cover of this eight page issue features a new drawing of Mohammad which, sure enough, has managed to offend and provoke many Muslims - with the more extreme elements, in Pakistan for example, calling for further revenge killings in order to defend the honour of the prophet and punish those who, in their eyes, are guilty of blasphemy and wilfully insulting 1.5 billion people. 

Interesting as this reaction might be, that's not really my concern. Rather, what worries me is not the image, but the text that accompanies the image: above the crying cartoon figure is written tout est pardonné - all is forgiven.

I must confess to finding this outrageously sanctimonious; an attempt by the staff of the magazine to position themselves on the moral high ground by offering their own rather cheap and unconvincing imitation of Christ. They'll be telling us next that the twelve members of staff who died did so that we all might live in a more tolerant, more peaceful, and more loving world. It's a bit rich to say the least.

Equally galling - and further evidence of Charlie Hebdo's arrogance and inability to learn anything of import from what has just happened - is the fact that the figure also holds up a sign saying Je suis Charlie. The fanaticism of the political idealists who produce the magazine blinds them to the fact that, clearly, not everyone subscribes to or identifies with a universal model of secular humanism wrapped in the colours of the tricolore or star-spangled banner.

Charlie Hebdo can only conceive of a future in its own image; it cannot conceive of terrorism as the emergence of a radical antagonism at the very heart of globalization and as a malevolent force that is irreducible to the New World Order. One would suggest that the editors, writers, and cartoonists at the magazine - as well as their supporters - read Jean Baudrillard who, writing in 2002 after the attack on the Twin Towers, argues that the problem is we in the West have grown so powerful, so smug and self-satisfied, that we no longer care even to admit that there remain others in the world who do not share our dreams and our values:

"It all comes from the fact that the Other, like Evil, is unimaginable. It all comes from the impossibility of conceiving of the Other - friend or foe - in its radical otherness, in its irreconcilable foreignness. A refusal rooted in the total identification with oneself around moral values and technical power. ... How can the Other, unless he is an idiot, a psychopath or a crank, want to be different, irremediably different, without even a desire to sign up to our universal gospel?" [62-3]
                                                     
This brilliant - but largely ignored - insight means that Muslims are right to be offended by the cover of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo - but are offended for the wrong reasons. What's offensive is not a silly little drawing, but the arrogant assumptions and ideological certainties behind it; the inability to contemplate for even one moment that the Islamists "might commit themselves entirely freely, without in any way being blind, mad or manipulated" [67] to their own moral laws, customs, and beliefs.

This kind of offends me too. And although I obviously don't call for the magazine to be burned, or the publishers murdered, I do wish the team at Charlie Hebdo would think about what they do with a little more subtlety and concern.   

 

See: Jean Baudrillard, 'Hypotheses on Terrorism', in The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 2003).

Je ne suis pas Charlie

Stephane Charbonnier 

1967 - 2015

The vile and sentimental murder of the journalists and illustrators who worked for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has shocked many people - though not those of us who vividly remember the events surrounding the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in 2005; or recall the shooting and attempted beheading of Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, the year before.   

Predictably, all the usual apologists for transpolitical terror and sympathizers with the Islamist cause have attempted to justify what happened in Paris. But equally galling is the manner in which many have echoed Je suis Charlie - more of a hollow slogan, rather than a meaningful gesture of solidarity.

The fact is other individuals, other publications, other news organizations etc., whilst defending in principle the notion of free speech, have not done so in practice. Rather, in practice, they have acted with a mixture of cowardice and hypocrisy - refusing, for example, to republish or broadcast the works that have (it's claimed) incited such hatred and religious madness.  

They say they are acting responsibly as good liberals should and choosing not to fan the flames or further offend Muslim sensibilities, but, really, they are just scared and prepared to compromise and self-censor in a manner that the radical activists of Charlie Hebdo - including its bravely defiant Editor, Stephane Charbonnier - absolutely refused to do. That's what made the latter heroic; they were prepared to put their lives on the line in a manner that most of us - to our shame - are not. 

I'm not Charlie - but neither are the majority who mouth the slogan even as they seek to appease the enemies of secular society and the values of the West in the name of multiculturalism and a desire to avoid trouble at all costs.