Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul said in an interview back in 2001 that the conversion of the South and East Asian peoples into Islam had negative effects on them, comparable to the effects of colonialism. In revenge, a Muslim-Turkish philosopher, supported by a lynch mob and Turkish security authorities, did not allow him in Istanbul, where Naipaul was scheduled to address the preliminary meeting of the European Writers Parliament (EWP).
This controversy inevitably evokes the memory of similar events in recent history, some of which I will outline below.
In 1989, a fatwa (Islamic verdict) was issued sentencing the novelist Salman Rushdie to death by the Spiritual Leader of Iran, Ayetullah Khomeini. The fatwa was effective particularly among the British Muslim communities of South and East Asian origin. Copies of Rusdie’s novel “Satanic Verses” were burnt in Muslim British demonstrations and major bookshops were forced after a series of bombings to withdraw the copies of this novel from their shop-windows and bookshelves. Since then, Rushdie has been forced to live under protection.
“Satanic Verses” was immediately translated into Turkish after its first publication in English in 1988 but could not find a publisher. In 1993, Aziz Nesin, the greatest modern Turkish satirist, decided to publish excerpts from the Turkish translation in his column in a daily newspaper. In July 1993, Nesin participated in a literary festival in the central Anatolian town of Sivas, in remembrance of the 16th Century Alevi poet Pir Sultan Abdal.
Naipaul observes the following on the fall of the Sindh province in India to Muslim conquest in the 8th Century: “The king of Sindh resisted quite well. Then one day it was reported to him how the invaders said their prayers in unity as one man, and the king became frightened. He understood that this was a new force in the world, and it is what in fact Muslims are very proud of: the union of people.” This critical commentary on the history of the Islamisation of Asia, which the Muslim-Turkish scholars find offensive, resembles to what happened on 4 July 1993 in Sivas.
A thousands-strong fanatic Islamist mob gathered in front of the hotel in town square, where Nesin and hundreds of participants of the festival were hosted. They chanted “God is Great!” “as one man” and then set the hotel on fire. Sivas police watched the event from a distance and nobody in the government ordered the military units to charge the mob for the protection of the festival guests.
Nesin survived the attack but thirty three participants of the festival, including poets, writers, literary critics and musicians, suffered a horrible death. These thirty three gems are the rather ironic martyrs of Ayetullah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and their families and friends still do not know where to seek compensation for their loss.
Similar attacks on writers with religious and/or nationalist motives have continued to our day. Most importantly, prominent Armenian writer/journalist Hrant Dink was murdered on 19 January 2007. Prior to his assassination Dink had been sentenced by a Turkish court for “degrading Turkishness”; during the trial he had been threatened outside the courtroom by the senior members of the Turkish “deep state”, including General Veli Küçük and lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz.
The “best pen of Turkish literature”, Orhan Pamuk, was also subject to similar judicial, semi-official and Mafioso threats and attacks. The reason for this Turkish style “literary criticism” was Pamuk’s statement during an interview that “one million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds were killed in Turkey”. As a result, the one and only Turkish Nobel Laureate had to flee his country for America; since then, he has been forced to pay only occasional “clandestine” visits to Istanbul.
Most recently, Yugoslavian filmmaker Emir Kusturica had to leave Turkey, during a film festival, under threats to his life. The threats were issued by the high authorities, including the Minister of Culture, who argued that a man who denies genocide against Muslims has no place in Turkey – presumably because you can only have a place in Turkey if you deny the genocide against Christians, as 72 million Turkish citizens are forced to do.
The source of the mounting threats against Naipaul, the chief Turkish-Muslim philosopher Hilmi Yavuz, has showed relief after the cancellation of the Nobel Laureate’s visit to Turkey: “He would be anxious to appear in front of the people whose religion he degraded”. Indeed, “anxious” is the word: Prior to his assassination, Hrant Dink wrote that “My heart moves like an anxious dove”.
Religious fanaticism marked the history of Medieval Europe, the most prominent symbol of which is the Inquisition. It was the heyday of fanatic Christian “philosophers”, judges and lynch mobs who traumatized thousands of people around Europe through torture and execution sessions in public. The victims were exclusively charged with “degrading Christianity”. Naipaul’s “philosophically condemned” criticism of Islam implies that contemporary Muslims demonstrate a degree of intolerance comparable to Medieval Christian Inquisition.
It is far beyond my knowledge to evaluate the world of Islam in accordance with this claim. Nor, do I have any intention to engage here in a criticism of the Western colonial influence on Naipaul’s worldview. But an observation of the recent history of “literary criticism a la turca”, including Hilmi Yavuz’s “philosophical criticism” of Naipaul, supported by a lynch mob, exclusively affirms the novelist’s critical points on Muslim intolerance at least for this country.
Zafer Yörük taught political theory at University of London between 1997 and 2006. His research interests range across politics of identity, discourse analysis and psychoanalysis. He writes a column for Rudaw every Friday from Izmir.