Christians must stand in solidarity with Salman Rushdie

And we can't just wring our hands at the fate of people like Benazir Bhutto, writes George Pitcher.

I wrote a short script last week for a BBC Radio 2 slot that I do irregularly. The spot, called Pause for Thought, is really an exercise in applied theology – we’re given a theme which we examine through the context of our faiths.

This one was “My Favourite Photograph” and, in a crowded and competitive field of family photographs, I chose instead the screensaver on my mobile phone. It was taken in the spring of 1976 and shows a big-haired, 20-year-old me, at my friend Paddy’s 21st birthday bash in his Oxford college, next to two young women. One is standing under a portrait of Napolean on his horse and holding a giant teddy bear (it was that kind of party); the other is a young Pakistani woman of perhaps 22.

I and this young woman are looking away at something in the near distance – a home movie screen, I think, showing images of the school days I shared with Paddy. I have to say she’s looking at it far more elegantly and photogenically than I am. I’m post-rationalising it now, of course, but she looks like she’s looking purposefully into the future.

Balliol College, Oxford, 1976: Benazir Bhutto is on the left

For this was Benazir Bhutto, seeming remarkably relaxed as she faced her finals at Oxford, who went on to be the great reforming prime minister of Pakistan in the late 80s and 90s. None of us there – including her I believe – could have guessed that then. My friend Paddy had probably just introduced us with something like: “This is Benazir – her family are quite big in Pakistan.”

Self-sacrificially

My family say I have this screensaver because it’s an image of a callow me with a famous future stateswoman. Anyway, who has a pic of themselves as a screensaver? My script for the BBC tried to mount an argument, perhaps a little portentously, that I keep it because, every time I pick up my phone, it reminds me what it is to live a life self-sacrificially.

She fought for woman’s rights and liberal democracy in Pakistan. And she was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 2007, aged 54. I might add that it also reminds me that I went on from that photograph, by contrast, to the safety and self-indulgence of UK journalism. Each to their own, I suppose.

What I tried to say on-air was that we were very different, culturally and socio-economically. But in our faiths – she a Muslim; me developing a Christian curiosity – we shared more in common regarding the primacy of a self-sacrificial life than divided us.

A world less safe

Since I drafted that BBC script, the author Salman Rushdie has been stabbed and severely wounded at an event in New York. The world has got less safe since I met Benazir and the precious tenets of liberal democracy for which she fought, such as the freedoms of speech and religious expression, more threatened than we could have imagined at a party in the mid-70s – a dawn in which it was bliss to be alive and very heaven to be young.

So I wonder now whether it’s a sufficiency simply to acclaim a life led self-sacrificially. To be sure, its a founding principle of the Christian faith, if we aspire to be Christ-like in the model of the Nazarene. But in the face of religious intolerance, fundamentalism and, indeed, fascism, can it really be sufficient to applaud those who risk everything to live by what they believe in, without finding some substantive way to stand alongside them in solidarity?

Benazir – I continue with the informality of her first name because that’s what we called her at that distant party – was a moderniser, a democrat and a fierce defender of human rights. She believed that the future of Islam depended on it embracing such secular values.

Accusations of hypocrisy

There are also mild accusations of hypocrisy levelled at her; according to her biographer Shyam Bhatia, she was “chameleon-like” and “was prepared to be all things to all people”. So she presented as a conservative Muslim in Pakistan and as a social liberal in the West. We’re holding wine glasses in our photo – mine was certainly filled with wine and I think hers was too. But, viewed positively, this was surely a talent for meeting people where they are - a Christ-like quality - rather than where we demand them to be.

Benazir’s murder was almost certainly, according to the CIA, orchestrated by the Pakistani Taliban. Rushdie’s attempted murder, some 15 years later, was apparently at the hands of a lone-wolf terrorist, carrying the authority of the fatwa served on him by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989 (during Benazir’s first term as Pakistan’s PM, as it happens), for the alleged blasphemies of his novel The Satanic Verses. Today’s government of Iran blames the attack on Rushdie himself and his supporters.

Apostates

Both Benazir and Rushdie were viewed as apostates by elements of fundamentalist Islam. The former maintained her Muslim faith, the latter renounced his for a “hardline” (his word) atheism. What they shared is a love for secularism, in the sense that a society must hold its believers and non-believers in equality of freedom of thought and expression.

As far as my Christian tribe is concerned, the Anglican Communion recently broke up its decennial Lambeth Conference at Canterbury having apparently invested most of its attention on what consenting adults of the same sex may or may not do in the privacy of their bedrooms.

That is clearly no longer good enough. Contemporary history shows us that wrung hands are deeply insufficient. The Christian west needs to stand firmly and demonstrably in the corner of both Muslims like Benazir and atheists like Rushdie.

Until and unless we can show that we’re in this together, then we can’t call ourselves what we should be – their sisters and brothers. Worse, we can’t call ourselves witnesses to the living Christ.

George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest