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Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (6)
Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (6)
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(1)
Salman Rushdie Life under threat
(2)
Suddenly I was metaphorically among people whose social attitudes I'd fought for all my life, for example, their attitudes about women.
(3)
One Islamicist boasted to me that his wife would cut his toenails while he made telephone calls and suggested I find such a spouse, or about gays.
(4)
One of the I moms I met in December 1990 was on TV soon afterwards, denouncing Muslim gays as sick creatures who brought shame on their families and who ought to seek medical and psychiatric help.
(5)
Had I truly fallen in among such people?
(6)
That was not what I meant at all.
(7)
Facing the intransigence, the Philistine scorn of so much of actually existing Islam, I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into the Muslim culture I dreamed of.
(8)
The progressive, irreverent, skeptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture, which is what I've always understood as freedom.
(9)
Not me.
(10)
Not in this lifetime.
(11)
No chance actually existing Islam, which has all but deified its prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification, which has supplanted a priest.
(12)
Free religion by a priest ridden one which makes literalism a weapon, and redescriptions of crime which will never let the likes of me in.
(13)
Even Russia's ideas were silenced in their time and throughout the Muslim world today progressive ideas are in retreat.
(14)
Actually existing Islam reigns supreme.
(15)
And just as the recently destroyed actually existing socialism of the Soviet terror state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is actually existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
(16)
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation.
(17)
I do not believe I passed the point, but others have thought otherwise.
(18)
I have never disowned my book nor regretted writing it.
(19)
I said I was sorry to have offended people because I had not set out to do so.
(20)
And so I am.
(21)
I explained that writers do not agree with every word spoken by every character.
(22)
They create a truism in the world of books, but a continuing mystery to the Satanic Versus opponents.
(23)
I have always said that this novel has been produced.
(24)
Indeed, the chief benefit of my meeting with the six Islamic scholars on Christmas Eve 1990 was that they agreed that the novel had no insulting motives in Islam.
(25)
It is a man's intention that counts, I was told.
(26)
Now we will launch a worldwide campaign on your behalf to explain that there has been a great mistake.
(27)
All this with much smiling and friendliness and handshaking.
(28)
It was in this context that I agreed to suspend, not cancel, a paperback edition to create what I called a space for reconciliation.