Published in the Pakistani newspaper ‘The News’ on 22nd June 2007, the article offers a bird’s eye view on East-West cultural and political relations; rightfully the late Anjum Niaz (1948-2018) deplored the knighting of Salman Rushdie, an affair that terminated my relations with the Iranian government. When (in 1989) Ayatollah Khomeini issued his unnecessary, notorious fatwa against the mediocre and corrupt author, I was asked by the Iranian authorities to write against the author and his book (at the time, I had not yet adhered to Islam, being an irreligious Greek citizen). I rejected the proposal by saying the following:
– If Ayatollah Khomeini truly believed that Salman Rushdie had to be killed for writing this book, he would have to give the necessary secret order and then the respective Iranian authorities would execute this order. But now, he offered this petty author the greatest opportunity of his life. First, this author will not be killed, because he will be duly protected; second, he will become as famous as Ayatollah Khomeini; third, he will be portrayed in terms of parity with the head of the Iranian state. The entire affair will defame Iran, making of a worthless writer a rich and much loved celebrity.
I was proven correct, as I am always correct when I state that there is no place for Islam in politics, there is no place for politics in Islam, today’s Muslims are fake (with the few exceptions only confirming the rule), and there are no proper religions today.
All the same, the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ is a pseudo-historical concept, insidiously propagated by the Western World, and subsequently by all the puppets of the western establishments, notably Erdogan, who initiated another nonexistent concept, i.e. ‘the Alliance of the Civilizations’. He has thus played into the colonial game of his criminal masters, by contributing to the ignorance, the confusion, the idiocy and the degeneration of most of the world’s Muslims.
Analphabetic Erdogan failed to learn that civilizations have never ‘allied’ with one another; even worse, the introduction of a rival concept (against another) necessitates that the original concept already exists. Unfortunately for the imbecile Erdogan and his disgustingly uneducated advisers, there is no ‘Clash of Civilizations’; it is only a Western lie to the diffusion of which they have greatly contributed with their ridiculous, even clownish, ‘Alliance’.
For a true Muslim, the passive and pathetic acceptance of each and every fake Western concept is tantamount to desecration of the Quran. So, if you want to form a ‘Muslim’ government in your country, you first withdraw from NATO and then fully evacuate the diplomats of the colonial countries from your territory, following Kemal Ataturk’s example, practices and methods. Otherwise, you are a miserable and disreputable slave; on the latter occasion, they most probably call you ‘Erdogan’ – the filthiest excrement on Earth.
The article below is not retrievable anymore after the recent (2018) death of the author. The quotation (in blue color) is made from my article “Turkey, Prof. Huntington, Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, and the Antichrist”; this article can be found here:
http://www.aramnaharaim.org/English/FutureOfTurkey11_25_5_2007.htm
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To Sir with love
By Anjum Niaz
22 June 2007
https://www.thenews.com.pk/archive/print/60969-to-sir-with-love
It stinks — Sir Salman Rushdie and Sir Ian Botham! A blasphemer and a racist. But, I guess you can’t quibble with the Queen. Especially when it’s the ‘ole girl’s’ birthday. If her majesty, newly turned 81, wants to pat their shoulders with a sword and have them kneel down to become her knights, who are we to rage? But to make kosher the duo’s vomit of profanity is dealing the good folks here at home a double whammy: Botham joked about Pakistan being the ideal place to send your mother-in-law; Rushdie was the devil incarnate when he penned Satanic Verses. The Brits and the Yankees have already dismissed Pakistan’s faceless millions as ‘fundos.’ Now even Queen Elizabeth II has joined the war on terror by knighting Salman Rushdie for services to ‘cream puffs’ who adore him for castigating Islam.
“Sir Salman’s knighthood is a reflection of his contribution to literature throughout a long and distinguished career which has seen him receive international recognition for a substantial body of work”, retorts Robert Brinkley, the British high commissioner in Islamabad with a devil-may-care attitude when he gets called to our foreign office. On the other end of the spectrum, is our loose cannon religious minister, son of dictator Zia, who has hit headlines in the West with his bombshell, “If somebody has to attack by strapping bombs to his body to protect the honour of the Prophet then it is justified.” Ijazul Haq has since retracted his statement, changing it to, “If someone blows himself up, he will consider himself justified. How can we fight terrorism when those who commit blasphemy are rewarded by the West? We demand an apology by the British government. Their action has hurt the sentiments of 1.5 billion Muslims.”
Maverick and crafty, Samuel Huntington, the Harvard historian who coined the phrase ‘Clash of Civilisations’ must have his ego ballooned high in the sky considering that his evil prophecy could never be nearer to truth than today. He had said in 1993 that the world would face great divisions which will not be geo-political but cultural. Civilisations that differentiate people from each other are grounded in religion, history, language and tradition. “The fault lines of civilisations are the battle lines of the future.” Get “confrontational” said the professor to the West. If you want your supremacy to last than sort out the Muslim nations that stand in your way was his thesis. It tickled everyone (almost) with its controversial contents. He quoted M J Akbar, who believed: “The West’s next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Islamic world. It is the sweep of Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan from where the struggle for the new world order will begin.”
A Greek citizen of Turkish origin, Dr Megalommatis is a political scientist who while garbaging the Huntington treatise as a most “erratic and devious fabrication of concept” unequivocally declares that there is no clash of civilisations and that there never will be. “Throughout history, there had never been a clash of civilisations, contrary to the clashes of religions, of states, ideologies, and of peoples.” He explains that the difference between two cultures is a difference between the religions, the philosophies, the ideologies, and the behavioural systems that pertain to two different peoples and societies. The difference between two civilisations is a difference that refers also to material results of daily activities of two peoples. But there was never a clash between two peoples and two states due to their differences in terms of architecture, literature, art, artisan practices, pottery, metallurgy, etc. “You don’t fight a war because your nutrition is based on beans and not on macaroni!”
Okay — while we let the political scientists, journalists and historians sort out the semantics among themselves, even pull out each other’s hair if they have any left by now, the baldy satyr-faced Rushdie, who celebrated his 60th birthday this week is well ensconced in his luxury apartment in Manhattan in the company of his third wife, half his age and twice as attractive as him. Dumping his second wife Marianne Wiggins who stood by him for 12 years when he went into hiding and ditching his adopted country which coughed up £10 million to save him from Ayatollah Khomeini, Sir Salman opted for loftier vistas of New York and newer model of domestic bliss in the year of our Lord 2000.
Rushdie moved to Manhattan in the arrogant hope of becoming a literary icon and winning the hearts and minds of the American literati. But that did not happen. Apart from a measly few spots on the op-ed pages of The New York Times in which he ventilated anti-Islamic feelings, the rest of America couldn’t care less who this bloke was. His latest book Shalimar the Clown got blistering reviews from top reviewers like John Updike of The New Yorker, Michiko Kakatuni of NY Times and Peter Kemp of Sunday Times. Dedicated “in loving memory of my Kashmiri grandparents” the book, writes Updike “…beneath the tinsel and the outrage, the Hindu and Bollywood mythmaking, the jittery verbal razzmatazz, is as simple as a legend…Rushdie as a literary performer suffers… his fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music predated the fatwa, and gives his fiction a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel.”
I may not agree with everything the Iranian government says but I second their anger at Tony Blair’s audacious move to alienate Muslims all around the world by resurrecting Rushdie: “giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is a blatant example of anti-Islamism…by paying tribute to this apostate and detested figure it will definitely put British statesmen and officials at odds with Islamic societies, the emotions and sentiments of which have again been provoked.” But the British like to pander to people like Ian Botham, Salman Rushdie, and V S Naipaul who create waves by their violently contested views on Islam. After Naipaul became Sir Naipaul, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Who knows Rushdie too may be headed that way.
Muslims are being alienated. Why go far? In our own backyard, the Americans are playing dirty when they send their top spymaster John Negroponte, currently the deputy secretary of state, hard on the heels of Richard Boucher (pronounced butcher by many TV wallahs) the assistant secretary of state, and Pentagon’s top soldier to make sure that their security interests in the region are safe, Musharraf or no Musharraf!
The clash of civilisation gets a push when the US and UK paint dictatorships that they support with words like ‘democracies,’ ‘elected leaders;’ when they call dictators like Mubarak and Musharraf ‘president”; when a Palestinian gets killed by the Israelis, he is said to have been violent; while Islamists “hate” the West, no Western party or leader ever hates Islamists, even if those very same leaders use their parliamentary positions to acquire permissions to drop Tomahawk cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and a host of other high-tech horrors on innocent civilians and when a fellow commits blasphemy, they say, ‘to Sir with love.’
By the way, where are the Saudis on Rushdie’s knighthood? No word yet!
The writer is a freelance journalist with over twenty years of experience in national and international reporting.
Email: aniaz@fas.harvard.edu
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