SIR Salman Rushdie — it has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it? A faintly ridiculous ring, much like Sir Mick Jagger or Sir Ian Botham, and not a million miles removed from Lord Ahmed or Baroness Uddin.

The British honours system is an undemocratic anachronism that ought to have been abolished decades ago, yet it seems many people in Britain and across the lands once colonised in the name of the crown still covet the silly titles and the right they thereby gain to embellish their names with initials that invoke a non-existent entity: the British empire.

Lord Anybody and Sir Anything cannot expect to be taken too seriously in the 21st century, any more than those whose lopsided lexicon is heavily laden with terms such as apostasy and blasphemy. And after the cash-for-honours scandal that has rocked the Blair administration in recent years, it is surprising that anyone with an ounce of self-respect would wish to supplement their surname with a KBE, MBE, CBE or OBE.

However, it seems relatively few recipients are able to resist the temptation. Fewer still are able to imbue their rejection of a title with the sort of outrage that the poet Benjamin Zephaniah expressed a few years ago: “OBE me? … I get angry when I hear that word ‘empire’; it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality. … Mr Blair and Mrs Queen, stop going on about empire.’

Over the decades, the refuseniks have ranged from performers such as John Lennon and Roy Bailey (both of whom returned MBEs they had earlier accepted, in a protest against British foreign policy), to an apolitical knicker manufacturer by the name of Joseph Corre, who this month proved himself more conscientious than the purported doyen of post-colonial novelists, who greeted his knighthood by pronouncing himself “thrilled and humbled to receive this great honour” and “very grateful that my work has been recognised in this way”.

Why, wondered The Guardian’s Michael White, “would a leftie who had abandoned Britain for New York in a huff want a knighthood from the British establishment?” There could be several answers, but one is constrained to question the premise of Rushdie as a leftist.

Some of these answers were provided by Cambridge academic Priyamvada Gopal, who pointed out in the same newspaper that Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa played a role in turning the talented writer into Sir Salman, a servitor of the Bush regime who enthusiastically supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Rushdie,” he says, “has abdicated his own understanding of the novelist’s task as ‘giving the lie to official facts’. Now he recalls his own creation Baal, the talented poet who becomes a giggling hack coralled into attacking his ruler’s enemies.”

It wasn’t always thus. Rushdie’s acerbic wit and mastery of the English language was once employed in anti-establishmentarian endeavours, in taking to task not only a former British prime minister whom he dubbed “Mrs Torture”, but also subcontinental leaders, some of whom were inclined to sue him for defamation.

Indira Gandhi, for instance, took issue with ‘Midnight’s Children’, which brought Rushdie to the attention of the reading public after it won him the Booker Prize in 1981 (and, a decade and a half later, the Booker of Bookers).

I recollect finding ‘Midnight’s Children’ less than unputdownable: it took me months to finish, and after all these years it’s easier to recall the delight occasioned by Rushdie’s refreshing style — he relished word-play and employed it to devastating effect — than anything significant about the characters or the plot.

In contrast, it took me two days to lap up ‘Shame’ a couple of years later. It was partly a matter of necessity — the fact that the book had been banned in Pakistan inevitably meant there were plenty of other readers imaptient to get their hands on it — but also an enjoyable experience, not least because the author repeatedly lapsed into extended asides in which he eloquently eviscerated the obscurantist miasma that had enveloped the nation under Ziaul Haq.

I have a nagging suspicion that the contemptible contribution of the late military dictator’s son to a National Assembly debate on Rushdie’s knighthood had as much to do with ‘Shame’ as with ‘The Satanic Verses’. Be that as it may, the spectacle of Virgin Ironpants riding to the rescue was an amusing bonus. Benazir Bhutto’s broad swipe against Ejazul Haq may primarily have been prompted by a chance to score brownie points in the West, but her critique was entirely apt.

For the record, I was fairly unimpressed by ‘The Satanic Verses’. Khomeini’s unusual recommendation made it a must-read; when the opportunity presented itself, I ploughed through it within three or four days, and was left wondering what the fuss was all about. But then, it was taken as a given that those baying for the author’s blood hadn’t bothered to acquaint themselves with the ostensible cause for their homicidal wrath.

‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’, published a few years later, was a better read, but it was followed in due course by the thoroughly disappointing ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’, in which Rushdie made a complete mess of highly promising ingredients. I failed to finish it, and haven’t bothered to look up ‘Shalimar the Clown’.

Apart from the decline in the quality of his literary output, which may well be related to the personal exigencies he faced following the fatwa, it was off-putting to find him literally swathing himself in the Stars and the Stripes at the outset of the so-called war on terror. That particular image occasioned a diminution of respect; in contrast, his acceptance of a knighthood stirs pity rather than derision.

However, any doubts that may reasonably be entertained about Rushdie’s literary canon or the appropriateness of a knighthood pale into insignificance in the face of the intemperate tirades unleashed in Iran and Pakistan by clerics and petty politicians eager for a distraction.

It isn’t hard to understand why the troubled governments of the two countries are eager to craft a mountain out of what isn’t, strictly speaking, even a molehill. But does either of them realise how petulant it makes them seem when the British ambassador or high commissioner is summoned to the foreign ministry for a dressing down in this context?

There is no evidence that the committee which recommended Rushdie for a knighthood intended it as a calculated insult to Muslim sensibilities or contemplated the possibility of a backlash.

Notwithstanding one’s reservations about the effete British honours system, Rushdie is no less worthy a knight than any of his co-recipients. It is not so much the knighthood that has once again focused sustained attention on Rushdie and ‘The Satanic Verses’ as the injuries of the would-be avengers.

If there is a silver lining in this sordid affair, it lies in the evidence that most Muslims have thus far sensibly chosen to ignore it. Despite concerted efforts to whip up a frenzy, demonstrations in Pakistan and Britain have attracted dozens rather than thousands of protesters. Parliamentary resolutions in Tehran and Islamabad haven’t been echoed by mass action.

Among the follies that stand out, pride of place must go to the suggestion from Pakistan’s ancestrally compromised religious affairs minister, Ejazul Haq, that a suicide bombing would serve Rushdie right (he unconvincingly recanted shortly afterwards).

The speaker of the Punjab Assembly, Afzal Sahi, went a step further by hinting at personally carrying out such an attack. Meanwhile, the Sindh chief minister, Arbab Ghulam Rahim, appears to be under the illusion that there is some symbolic value attached to the medals awarded to the Raj toadies among his forebears.

Enterprising fundamentalists have put a price on Rushdie’s head. Above all, it must be hoped that common sense will prevail at the popular level, and the puniness of the protests will continue to bear out their irrelevance.

In the final analysis, the British government owes no explanations to anyone in honouring whomever it deems worthy.

By the same token, everyone else has the right to disagree with him, vociferously or otherwise. But no one — least of all those who are convinced that he will anyhow be punished in the hereafter — has the right to cause or threaten any harm to his person.

Should the need arise, the Bush administration will, hopefully, offer Rushdie at least the same level of protection that the Tory establishment in Britain provided, sometimes a trifle grudgingly, through much of the 1990s. It must also be hoped that the diplomatic row unnecessarily stirred by Iran and Pakistan will not escalate.

At any rate, Tony Blair, whose prime ministership is history as of today, must have been relieved to bequeath the problem to Gordon Brown. Blair, after all, has had fundamentalist issues of a more personal nature to worry about. His final official engagement abroad was an audience with the Pope, at which he sought benediction for a formal conversion to Catholicism. It has been surmised in the British press that Benedict was scathing in his critique of Blair’s role in the Iraqi cataclysm. There has been no word on whether Blair was suitably contrite. More to the point, his confessional shenanigans in the dying days of his tenure make it incumbent upon anyone who has ever thought of Blair as exceptionally intelligent to reconsider their brash verdict.

mahir.worldview@gmail.com