Dominic Cavendish reviews Hanif Kureishi’s play ‘The Black Album’ in the Telegraph. Writing about a scene in the play which depicts Muslims burning a copy of the Satanic Verses, Cavendish remarks, ‘in the most disturbing scene we see a copy of The Satanic Verses being set alight - a perfect instance of Islamo-fascism.’

The burning of books, effigies and flags, is a popular method of protesting one’s anger with a particular target. ‘Symbolic expression’, as it’s called, reflecting the use of symbols to express oneself.

Quite why Cavendish should term the book burning incident as ‘Islamo-fascism’ is unclear. Perhaps to conjure up the worst instances of Nazi book burning, the vocabulary deliberately placing expressions of Muslim anger at the publication of the Satanic Verses on par with the comprehensive evils of the Nazi regime.

Book burning at protests is not something Muslims alone have practiced. Harry Potter books, among other things, were burnt in a bonfire in Mexico by Christians who believed the book to promote witchcraft among the young. The incident didn’t attract the label ‘Christo-fascism’, just the usual debate on free speech and Enlightenment values.

In a case adjudicated by the US Supreme Court in 1989, Texas vs Johnson, in which an American sought to defend his right to burn the US flag, the court ruled that flag burning constituted a form of free expression, something protected by the First Amendment, and was therefore every American’s right, even though the flag for many is a symbol of reverence. The same may be said of books. To many, the written word too is sacred and ought to be defended against censorship, desecration and burning.

Some may well find book burning to be offensive, and we’re certainly not condoning it, but the entitlement of those defending an author’s right to express himself, without fear of censorship, ought not to deny the entitlements of others to express, symbolically or otherwise, their views on the author’s output. Book burning has a long history and not one exclusive to Muslims. Cavendish’s terming the burning of the Satanic Verses as ‘a perfect instance of Islamo-fascism’, is ignorant and unwarranted.

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Yunus Yakoub Islam     |2009-07-24 02:31:13 Most people in N. Europe associate book burning with Nazis and hence the result of the burning of SV in Britain was to elicit widespread public disgust, inflamed no doubt by the media. In fact, as Gabriele Marranci notes in The Anthropology of Islam (2008), it seems those who engaged in the original book burning protests were simply unaware of the cultural connotations of their act (he interviewed one of the protesters 10 years after the event).

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