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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (5)
Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (5)
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(1)
Salman Rushdie, life under threat.
(2)
And I said to myself, admitted, Salman, the story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives.
(3)
Of course, you're no Mystic Mr.
(4)
And when you wrote I am not a Muslim, that's what you meant.
(5)
No supernaturalism, No literalist orthodoxies, No formal rules for you.
(6)
But Islam doesn't have to mean blind faith.
(7)
It can mean blind faith.
(8)
It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization as openminded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was, as intellectual and philosophical as you like.
(9)
Don't let zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself.
(10)
Remember what it meant.
(11)
Family and Light, I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the secular Muslim who, like the secular Jews, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology.
(12)
I had recently read the contemporary Muslim philosopher Fuad Zakaria's Alaysite, who Islamismi and have been encouraged by Zacharias attempt to modernize Islamic thought.
(13)
But, Salman, I told myself, you can't argue from outside the debating chamber.
(14)
You've got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim.
(15)
I recalled my near namesake, the 12th century philosopher Ibn Rusched Avaros, who argued that, to quote the great Arab historian Albert Hurani, not all the words of the Quran should be taken literally.
(16)
When the literal meaning of a Quranic verses appeared to contradict the truth to which philosophers arrived by the exercise of reason, those verses needed to be interpreted metaphorically.
(17)
But Eben Rashad was a snob.
(18)
Having pronounced an idea far in advance of its time, he qualified it by saying that such sophistication was only suitable for the elite.
(19)
Literalism would do for the masses.
(20)
Solomon I asked myself, is it time to pick up Eben Rashad's banner and carry it forward?
(21)
To say nowadays such ideas are fit for everybody, for the beggar as well as the Prince.
(22)
It was with such things in mind and with my thoughts in a state of some confusion and torment, that I spoke the Muslim creed before witnesses.
(23)
But my fantasy of joining the fight for the modernization of Muslim thought, for freedom from the shackles of the thought police was stillborn.
(24)
It never really had a chance.
(25)
Too many people had spent too long demonizing and totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say in the West.
(26)
Some friends turned against me, called me by yet another set of insulting names.
(27)
Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased.
(28)
I had betrayed myself, my cause.
(29)
Above all, I had betrayed them.
(30)
I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of actually existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies.
(31)
Actually existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on earth, and it wasn't about to let me of all people, argue in favor of 1.