Over at iEngage Inayat Bunglawala’s outfit (the ersatz Engage) they have a complaint:
Dominic Cavendish reviews Hanif Kureishi’s play ‘The Black Album’ in the Telegraph. Writing about a scene in the play which depicts Muslims burning a copy of the Satanic Verses, Cavendish remarks, ‘in the most disturbing scene we see a copy of The Satanic Verses being set alight – a perfect instance of Islamo-fascism.’
The burning of books, effigies and flags, is a popular method of protesting one’s anger with a particular target. ‘Symbolic expression’, as it’s called, reflecting the use of symbols to express oneself.
Quite why Cavendish should term the book burning incident as ‘Islamo-fascism’ is unclear.
Unclear? Unclear! Are they joking? Are they so politically unsophisticated that they have no idea of the symbolism associated with book burning in Europe?
Let us help them…
But wait a minute! The iEngage article continues:
Perhaps to conjure up the worst instances of Nazi book burning, the vocabulary deliberately placing expressions of Muslim anger at the publication of the Satanic Verses on par with the comprehensive evils of the Nazi regime.
Ah, so it’s not so ‘unclear’ after all. They know perfectly well what the symbolic resonances are with bonfires of burning books. What intrigues me is the qualification “the worst instances” – as if to say there were instances of Nazi book-burning which were moderate, or perhaps even perfectly acceptable.
Book burning at protests is not something Muslims alone have practiced. Harry Potter books, among other things, were burnt in a bonfire in Mexico by Christians who believed the book to promote witchcraft among the young. The incident didn’t attract the label ‘Christo-fascism’, just the usual debate on free speech and Enlightenment values.
Perhaps they should take a closer look at what sort of groups have traditionally been behind these ‘moral panic’ bonfires designed to ‘cleanse’ the community of impure and corrupting ideas, and indeed what these ‘ideas’ often were.
From the Bolton News:
“Deejays Tommy Charles and Doug Layton of WAQY in Birmingham – the scene of major civil rights disturbances in the 1960s – were first to pick up on Lennon’s comments and initiate a ban-the-Beatles campaign’.
“Starke in Florida had the dubious distinction of becoming the first place in the US to actually burn Beatles records, which was significant as the band had helped to desegregate the nearby city of Jacksonville just two years earlier.
“And there was also conspicuous involvement of the Ku Klux Klan in the campaign against the Fab Four. In South Carolina, for example, the Klan Grand Dragon Bob Scoggins nailed a Beatles record to a large cross and set it on fire.
“Other Klansmen justified their campaign on the grounds that not only were the Beatles blasphemous, but that they were not really white’ either.”
So, those feeding the burning pyres of ‘corrupt’ ideas were anti-desegregationalists and Nazi-sympathisers, harnessing fundamentalist religion to the service of racism. In short, Christo-fascists.
And yet it is ‘unclear’ to iEngage why Muslim book burners might find themselves bracketed in the same company. Do they not realise the utter disdain and contempt with which far-right Christian fundamentalists are held by wider society, including by mainstream Christians?