Murderers and Other Friends (13 page)

We spent more days in the Court of Appeal going through the history of blasphemy, discussing Darwin, Shelley, and a Mr Gott, who, in 1922, wrote that Jesus looked like a clown riding on a donkey, and was sent to prison for it (although in a recent musical Christ was presented as a clown on the stage with impunity). We lost our appeal, although the court freed Denis Lemon from his prison sentence. In the fullness of time, when I was in faraway Singapore and contemplating leaving the bar, the House of Lords also confirmed the conviction. So, to the amazement of many, blasphemy remains a part of our law, although to the fury of many others it is a weapon which can only be used to protect the Church of England. The judge's summing-up has been approved in the highest courts and it remains a criminal offence to make Anglicans blush.

It may seem extraordinary that a widely respected and beloved religion, for which so many people have endured ridicule, persecution and even death, should still require a protection so archaic and curious as our blasphemy laws. We all hold precious beliefs, but unless they can stand against mockery and abuse they are worth little, and it is an insult to Anglicans to suggest that their beloved forms of worship need to be supported by a criminal sanction. I'm sure that the House of Lords were wrong not to adopt Lord Denning's opinion and pronounce the blasphemy laws a dead letter. By saying that the Church of England has a blasphemy law, they laid us open to those who ask why other religions should not have one also at a time when an alleged blasphemy by a distinguished author was met, not with a suspended term of imprisonment, but with a sentence of death.

It's 1990, thirteen years after the
Gay Nevus
trial, and I have driven down the M4, skirted Slough by the Beaconsfield Road, turned right by the Do It All shop, and been lost in the rows of similar semi-detached houses, silent in the sunshine, fronted by sweetpeas and dahlias and Ford Consuls. I am in search of Dr Kalim Siddiqui, head of the Muslim Institute, enthusiastic supporter of the fatwa, the Iranian death sentence, on Salman Rushdie for the heinous crime of writing a novel, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, in which some reference is made to the alleged sexual life of the prophet Mohammed. Somewhere, in some more or less safe house, the author is suffering his nineteenth month in hiding, guarded by the SAS at a cost of £1,000 a day to the British taxpayer.

After knocking on a strange door and disturbing an unknown Indian family, I telephone the Doctor and he arrives to rescue me in his car. He is a short, tubby, frequently laughing man with grey hair and a beard. He is wearing flannel trousers, a fawn cardigan and a blue shirt. He looks exactly what he has been: a character around Fleet Street, an ex-sub-editor of the
Guardian
and one-time dramatic critic of the
Kensington News.
He was no doubt well-liked, full of jokes, buying rounds of drinks for the journalists in the pub and sticking to orange juice himself.

‘The Rumpole man!' His greeting is extremely cheerful. ‘I should have come to Henley-on-Thames to see you!' And when he leads me into the headquarters of the Muslim Institute, a semi indistinguishable from his home next door, he is still laughing. ‘Make yourself comfortable,' he says, and I sit among the box files, the books on Islam and notice Dr Siddiqui's British passport on the desk. ‘Now, what would you like? We can offer you coffee. Gold Blend? Or tea? Here you have a choice of Earl Grey or PG Tips.'

After he has fetched the tea and biscuits he tells me about the death of his young son. He doesn't speak without feeling but with a fatalistic acceptance of tragedy and, at the end, he can't stop chuckling at the line of Siddiquis to be buried on British soil. I have come to discuss assassination and religious persecution, and it's time to set about trying to understand a man who could countenance a murder because of the publication of a book.

‘Tell me about yourself.'

‘Not too much to tell, really.'

‘You worked on the
Kensington News?'

‘Oh, yes. The first time I had ever been in a theatre was as a dramatic critic. Then I worked on the
Wokingham Times,
the
Northern Echo,
the
Slough Express
and eight years on the
Guardian.
I love the brotherhood of journalists.'

‘You've said you're a typical
Guardian
man.'

‘Oh, yes. That's what I am.'

‘You're not a Thatcherite?'

‘Oh, no!' Dr Siddiqui laughs heartily at the idea. ‘I have never voted except for the old Labour man Fenner Brockway, when he stood for Slough and he didn't get in. Who's my favourite British politician? I think Harold Wilson added greatly to the merriment, although he didn't achieve much.'

‘In all your years in England, did you encounter any racial prejudice? Against you, I mean?'

‘Little pinpricks, perhaps. Nothing serious. I am fair-skinned. I could be a Spaniard. Oh, I think one fellow called me a “bloody Pakistani”.'

What have I discovered so far? A
Guardian
man who, unusually for one of that species, thinks irreligious writers should be put to death.

‘What's the worst thing about
The Satanic Verses,
from your point of view?'

‘Oh, dear.' Dr Siddiqui's cheerfulness leaves him and he sighs. ‘I thought we were going to discuss more interesting matters than that! It is definitely the attack on the prophet's personal character.' ‘Have you read the book?'

‘Not from cover to cover.' Dr Siddiqui cheers up again. ‘I have read a few pages. Funnily enough, I was in Iran when the book came out. I was waiting in the VIP lounge for my plane when a cabinet minister came up to me. He asked me about Rushdie and I told him what I knew. At lunch-time that day the Imam pronounced the fatwa. I don't know if it was due to me at all.'

‘You believe that the Islamic law is laid down by God?'

‘Of course. And the sentence for blasphemy or apostasy is death.'

‘But isn't Christ part of the Islamic religion?'

‘Oh, yes. He is a prophet. We have to believe in His virgin birth.' ‘And is the sentence death if you don't?'

‘Quite certainly!'

Making a mental note to advise the former Bishop of Durham to be careful when travelling to the Middle East, I ask, ‘Then don't the Christian virtues of forgiveness of sins, mercy, loving your enemies, have any part in your religion?'

‘No part at all!' Dr Siddiqui laughs happily again.

‘Wouldn't you want to show forgiveness?'

‘We can't do so. We have no choice.'

‘Don't you regret that?'

‘Not at all. In the West you have choice and look what it's brought you. Abortion. Rampant homosexuality. Mental illness. One-parent families. Aids!'

‘Do you believe in hell?'

‘Oh, yes. I tell you. I live in the fear of God every day.'

‘You don't think He'll forgive your sins?'

‘He might not.'

‘What's hell like?'

‘Oh, very hellish, I'm sure!'

‘Worse than Slough?'

‘No, no, I assure you' – he was laughing now, in spite of his fear of God – ‘I have been very happy in Slough.'

Dr Siddiqui has asked a large audience of Manchester Muslims to raise their hands if they agreed with the fatwa; this they did with enthusiasm. He has been at meetings where his audience chanted ‘Rushdie must die!' and ‘Burn the book!'

‘Going back to Salman Rushdie for a moment, can't you understand that your complete denial of free speech, your support of something as outrageous to us as a death threat for publishing words you disagree with, have damaged Islam in western eyes? And you've made your religion as terrifying to us as the Inquisition?'

‘That may be so. But . . .' For once Dr Siddiqui is not smiling, he is at a loss for an answer and there is a silence.

‘I suppose you're going to say it's God's will, and inevitable?'

‘Yes. Inevitable, yes.' He seems grateful for my suggestion. ‘That is it, of course.'

The concept of God has no doubt brought many benefits to the world but it's my belief that He should, if at all possible, be kept out of the criminal law.

Back in the theatre I had one more sign of possible intervention by an angry God. I had been standing on the steps of the cathedral in Siena, looking across at the entrance of the hospital. Families were crowding into it with food parcels for their sick relatives, and sightseers joined them, perhaps thinking that it was just another medieval palace to be visited. I imagined them, shepherded by their guides, straggling among the beds and looking up in awe at some painted ceiling where God's foot protruded from the clouds. So I invented a story about a visiting lecturer who fell off the British Council balcony during a cocktail party and, waking up in the hospital, and looking up at the ceiling painted with a celestial panorama, imagined he had died and been sent to heaven. He had written works on Byron and Baudelaire and thought of himself as a bit of a devil, a fascinating sinner to whom heaven was about as attractive as a Christian Science reading-room. He spends much of the play railing at the injustice of his lot. This short play was called

Mr Luby's Fear of Heaven
and I wrote a companion piece about hell in which the Prince of Darkness turns up as a curate to a trendy South London vicar. This vicar takes the view that miracles are the sort of vulgar conjuring tricks which a deeply caring, rational and Socialist God wouldn't stoop to. To his anger and dismay, when the Bishop comes to dinner unexpectedly, the miracle of the feeding of the multitude takes place in his fridge. Anything mechanical that happens on the stage is a gamble: doors that are meant to open for quick flight stick, doors that are meant to be locked swing open, and audiences giggle with delight at these accidents and actors panic. For three weeks the vicar's fridge didn't fail to deliver a huge number of loaves and fishes. Then, one Saturday night with a full house, just as the miracle was about to occur, the fridge burst into flames. Was it a complete accident or had the unseen hand of the spirit who wrote the judge's summing-up in
R.
v.
Lemon and Gay News
been at work again?

How do we come by our political opinions? What is certain is that we don't take a calm, dispassionate look at the alternatives available and decide to become a little Socialist or a little Conservative as the result of mature deliberation. Like much else about us, such things are decided by the accidents of birth, the fall of the dice which gave us our homes, our parents and the moment of history when we first became aware of the world around us. It may also be that only children, and I was an only child, are less tolerant than others of received opinions, more likely to espouse unpopular causes or join rebellious groups.

Not that I rebelled greatly against my parents' ideas. My father was a lifelong Liberal. The great political moment in his lifetime was the landslide election in 1905 when Lloyd George, a Welsh solicitor, orator and devoted womanizer, achieved power, routed the House of Lords and became my father's unlikely hero. My mother had read
The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism
and her ideas came from the writings of Ibsen, Shaw and H.G. Wells. I suppose she was an early feminist, although she behaved like the most devoted and self-sacrificing of wives.

I was born only five years after the 1914 war ended and the government conspicuously failed to provide homes for its heroes to live in. When I was dispatched to school some of the masters still suffered from shell-shock and battle fatigue, or had pieces of shrapnel lodged in them, causing them to fly into sudden and incalculable rages. We were preached to by parsons who were convinced that God was on our side in the Battle of the Somme and would no doubt come to our aid in the ‘next Great Match'. I remembered a sermon which began ‘This is the story of me and my batman Harry. And, of the two of us, Harry was no doubt the better man' and ended with some grisly episode in the trenches. One Armistice Day we had an outdoor service by the War Memorial, for which we all had to design posters showing gas attacks, heavy howitzers, primitive battles in the air (between Camels and Fokker Wolfs) and graves among Flanders poppies. The British Empire still reddened large portions of the globe, Kipling was much quoted (one of our school houses was called Gunga Din), and we were urged not to slick our hair down with butter because ‘some of the native regiments did that and it went rancid in hot weather, causing an unpleasant odour on the parade-ground'. There was no harm, we were told, in a little water on the comb.

It always surprises me that the proponents of various causes – peace studies, political correctness or family values – should be so anxious that these ideas should be preached to schoolchildren. My experience is that any idea recommended by schoolteachers sends the pupils scurrying off in the opposite direction. Even a fairly mild amount of Conservative and imperial propaganda at school led me to an early interest in Socialism and a romantic notion of eventually escaping from England and joining the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. I read Auden, Orwell and Hemingway, and imagined myself bumping on a truck through the dusty orange groves or planning the defeat of Fascism with a company of poets in the cafés of Barcelona. Politics, in those days, seemed delightfully simple: the Fascists were evil; the victory of the left would herald peace, justice and the age of the Common Man, whoever he might turn out to be.

When I was at Harrow another war had started and the rights and wrongs of world politics seemed even simpler. The good, Britain, France, Russia and America, were ranged against the evil, the Nazis and Fascists of Germany and Italy and the tyrants of Japan. From Harrow Hill, in the suburbs, we could see the fires of the Blitz lighting up London. We sat in the shelter, with our gas masks in cardboard boxes, and our housemaster switched on the wireless so we could hear Gracie Fields trilling ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye' and J.B. Priestley promising better days when the war was over. Whether we would live that long was a question that only rarely crossed our minds.