Wild World
Some people see irony in Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) performing at Jon Stewart's Rally To Restore Sanity. After all, he did support the fatwa calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie. (Oddly, this Talking Points Memo on the issue calls Islam a "conservative bete noir." So liberals don't mind people who support such fatwas?)
In 1989, Islam said
Salman Rushdie or indeed any writer who abuses the prophet, or indeed any prophet, under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death. It's got to be seen as a deterrent, so that other people should not commit the same mistake again.
He also apparently said "He must be killed. The Qur'an makes it clear - if someone defames the prophet, then he must die."
Here he is on tape being asked directly about Rushdie:
However, Islam denies he ever supported the fatwa. Okay, words can be tricky, perhaps he didn't express himself well, or maybe he was just joking. In any case, he disavows it today, so he seems to realize it was a mistake.
As he puts it:
I never called for the death of Salman Rushdie; nor backed the Fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini--and still don't. The book itself destroyed the harmony between peoples and created an unnecessary international crisis.
I feel so much better. Now we see what happened. When a religious leader calls for the death of a novelist, it's the writer's fault.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:13 AM
4 Comments:
I think his old comments and his new comments are not really in conflict.
Having read your post and watched your video, I would summarize Yusuf Islam's statements as follows:
"Islamic law -- like any legal system -- specifies a number of crimes, their penalties, and the legitimate authorities who can order such penalties. In particular, defaming a prophet (especially the prophet Muhammad) is a crime; the prescribed sentence is death; this sentence can only be issued by a legitimate state authority and then carried out by their legitimate agents. Since Rushdie was an Iranian citizen, the Iranian government was right to issue that sentence. Since I am not an executioner in the employ of the Iranian government, I have no right to carry out this sentence myself, even if I saw Rushdie in a restaurant."
That seems perfectly consistent. And I don't think he's distorting the truth to say "I never called for the death of Rushdie."
By comparison, if someone asked me whether I believe that Timothy McVeigh was sentenced to death in perfect accordance with American law, I would say yes. Indeed, if Federal law actually specified the death penalty as the required penalty for mass murder, I would even be right to use Yusuf's very words: "under Federal law, the sentence for that is actually death." And I don't think this would constitute my "calling for" the death of McVeigh.
Mutatis mutandis, Yusuf Islam is correct when he says he never "called for" the death of Rushdie.
In the video, he makes it clear that only a legitimate authority can carry out the sentence. This is good, in my opinion: it eliminates the many dangers of vigilante justice. If all Muslims thought like Yusuf Islam, Rushdie would be completely safe as long as he stays in Western countries that don't have extradition treaties with Iran.
Obviously, none of this addresses the law itself, which needless to say I do not support.
Didn't the fatwa call on all Muslims to kill him?
Yes, it did. But only a certain subset of Twelver Shia Muslims hold that the Ayatollah Khomeini had the authority to issue a fatwa binding on all Muslims throughout the world in this fashion. And Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam was not one of them.
He may very well have recognized Khomeini as the legitimate ruler of Iran (I don't know whether he did), but he certainly didn't consider Khomeini to have authority anywhere else.
Again, I very much disagree with death penalties for writing books, even if those penalties are applied by the legitimate government of the region!
Cat Stevens / Yusuf Islam did continue to write very nice tunes after his conversion. Here's "A is for Allah", asong he wrote to teach his son the Arabic alphabet.
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