THE History Channel on the cable is basically a western propaganda channel though one gets a lot of pictorial information on the subject its documentaries deal with. That’s one reason why it is watched with interest. In addition to events it also presents very cleverly skewed biographical studies of famous and infamous personalities of the world. In a documentary on Mao Zedong, the great Chinese leader was presented as a lecherous womanizer who unleashed the Cultural Revolution simply to get close to young girl students. When it suits the channel’s policy, however, choice characters are idolized like Mr Salman Rushdie the other day. He is shown as a budding talent from the very early years, a Booker prodigy in the making rising to prominence with the publication of his very first book. His publisher and the critics are all wow, wow.

Then comes the bombshell, the Satanic Verses which earns him euphoric acclaim from the West as probably the greatest writer of the century and a condemnation to hell as a perfidious apostate from Ayatollah Khomeini. Explaining the sentence the commentary opined that the Ayatollah was losing popularity after stalemate in the Iran-Iraq war and needed a bogey to restore his authority. This was the cause of the Fatwa, not Rushdie’s crude attempt to defile Islam’s most sacred personalities revered and esteemed by a billion people across the world.

The death sentence was not the correct way to deal with the man for two reasons: it would be deemed as a religious curb on literature and freedom of expression and would, as indeed it did, help shoot to undeserved notoriety a mediocre author and make his shoddy work a best seller in the West where whatever purports to insult Islam sells like candy. Mr Rushdie and his publishers pocketed the encashment of the sentence.

The documentary is an insensitive piece of propaganda as it tends to ridicule the protests in the Muslim world and goes out of its way to praise the book as a “masterpiece” and its author as a brave intellectual. Both appraisals are so much bunkum. Satanic Verses is not a piece of literature, far less a masterpiece. Most of the world’s great classics of fiction are held to be great because of their broad humanity and compassion, a yearning for love, justice and freedom and faith in the dignity of man as well as strong sentiments against oppression of all kinds. Read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Hesse, Mann, Camus, Kafka, Gide, Malraux, Singer, Joyce, Dickens, Maugham, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway and our own Manto, Ghulam Abbass, Krishan Chander, Quratul Ain, Tagore et al — just any of these great writers to find this deep human pathos defining the abiding value of their work apart from their literary craftsmanship in narration, creation of situations, characters and in so unfolding the story as to lighten your heart’s burden, make you cry or give you a profound view of life or leave you adrift in a haunting world of self discovery. These have been some undisputed characteristics of great literature. And what has Mr Rushdie to offer in this so-called masterpiece of his but a frivolous imagination running wild over page after page of redundant verbosity and chapter after chapter of inanity that you can skip over if you like or excise from the text without loss of any kind and that you can only be made to read, just once, as a punishment and which no one under any circumstance can read a second time or even remember what one had read. Why? Because, to put it politely and speaking honestly Satanic Verses is not literature by any such measure and if only readability were a criteria it could easily be junked as so much rubbish. But if it is not that and this opinion is an angry retort of some ignorant Muslim, as the hysterical outpouring of applause resounding from one end of the monochromatic West to the other proves, then, using this critical yardstick, in what category of literature would one place the works of the above mentioned big names, from Tolstoy to Tagore?

The documentary also portrays Mr Rushdie as a brave intellectual suffering for his views. He did suffer much (and made much money). That is true, having to pass days and nights under guard and yet not being sure at all if all was safe. Living in fear of threatened death is not cowardice. And perhaps there was no shame even in the apology he subsequently tendered. That is not the point. The point is that as an intellectual he has never done a brave thing, he has never stood up for any human cause or ever against the West and its politics of power and control, exploitation and duplicity. The point is that Mr Rushdie is a clever chap. Not brave, but clever. He understands very well that writers who indulge in this kind of freedom and take liberties with the accepted policies, plans and schemes of the West do not sell. The western media takes care of that. That is why the ludicrous pomposity of Mr Rushdie’s affected English sophistication irks. On his first trip to the States, he trots out nonchalantly making little fuss over his hurts but cannot resist the temptation to secure a five minute audience with President Clinton even though in some back vault of the White House (in amusing contrast to the low class hauteur of Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, another hater of his native society).

South Asians through such theatrics lubricate their assimilation in the uppity White man’s world. The harsh fact is that with his Muslim mask he is a post-modern mercenary of the Crusades the West finds difficult to forget. Instead of the death the Ayatollah condemned him to, he should be allowed to live and wallow in the gigolo’s debasement who desecrates his mother to please his mistress.