1988 saw the publication of Salman Rushdie's 'The Satanic Verses', and in the beginning, apart from the literary fanfare you might expect with the publication of a new book by the author of 'Midnight's Children',  you wouldn't really have noticed anything much had changed in the world, and certainly not in UK mosques, where the Booker Prize will usually cause about as much stir as the publication of the latest issue of an abstruse academic journal. Months later, however, a previously insignificant author in an almost unheard of and largely unread magazine for muslim readers published an article that would fairly quickly change all that. The author found Mr. Rushdie's book offensive and insulting, not to himself personally you must understand, but an insult to the Prophet and his wives and companions, an insult of which he had not doubt and that he explained and illustrated in a somewhat inflammatory manner for his readers using very brief selective extracts from the book. Now clearly if what was said in the article was true the book was highly inflammatory and seriously offensive to the muslim community, and although Impact magazine may have had very few readers, photocopies come cheap and the essentially offensive nature of the book could soon be seen on walls and tables in mosques (though the book had by now been reduced to its 'essence' on one A5 sheet of paper). But still it seemed insignificant really, almost laughable, a source of wry amusement that here the muslims in the mosques were at it again, getting worked up into a frenzy of indignation about something they had clearly misunderstood, and which had little relevance to their lives compared to so many things that they chose to ignore. And then someone (I seem to remember Kalim Siddiqui liked to take the credit) took it one stage further, and disregarding matters of actual guilt inquired of the Ayatollah Khomeini something like what was the sentence to be pronounced on an apostate who now attacked the Prophet and his family with the foulest of abuse, sacrilege, heresy and blasphemy, and the Ayatollah naturally suggested the appropriate historical punishment as he understood it, which was death. 

Whereupon the effluent hit the air conditioning, and the rest, as they say, is history. Suddenly there was a bounty on Rushdie's head, and the media brought the full weight of their dispassionate objectivity to bear on the case, and every TV programme from the News to Kilroy's pontifichat was gleefully fuelling the fire. Quite early in the proceedings, long before I could get a copy of the rapidly sold-out book to read, I was asked for my opinions on the BBC, but the wry amusement I had felt at the start of the proceedings had long given way to a cold horror at what was going on, and gentle words suggesting calm and reappraisal didn't have quite the same newsworthy impact as those at the Central Mosque who were telling the media that they would personally thrust the knife into him if only they were given the chance. But no-one was arrested for advocating murder (a big mistake in my opinion - I promise you an arrest or two would have quietened much of the bombast). I also gave a lecture or two about it at that time (one I gave at Swansea University can be found here), but matters already seemed to have got to the point where no-one could actually believe that he hadn't said what everyone seemed to be shouting so loudly that he had. And there were riots in Pakistan and other places in which people died, and academics in Europe who spoke out against what was going on got stabbed to death, and all manner of febrile insanity was going on. Long before the 'War on Terror' non-muslim friends told of their fears that women in burkas might be hiding suicide bombs strapped to their bodies (why they thought they would be walking around Sauchiehall Street armed and waiting for the opportunity to blow up Salman Rushdie if they happened to meet him I never could quite understand - but just as now fear makes people crazy). And I kept waiting for some muslim academic somewhere to explain to the masses that things were not quite as they seemed, or some politician willing to make a name for himself as a Sunni vanquisher of the Shi'a 'heretics' and challenge the Ayatollahs. But no-one did. And as things just kept getting more crazy I thought 'well, if no-one else is going to do anything to put forward an alternative point of view, I guess I will have to do it myself'. 

So having managed to get a copy of the book itself by now, in the spring of 1990 I sat and wrote the Tyranny of Certainty. It took me three months, and by that time things had only seemed to get worse rather than better, so at that point I had to decide what to do. Fortunately, a friend in the Education Department at Strathclyde Council felt they owed me a favour and offered to furtively get a hundred or so copies printed for me (it seems ridiculous to say it, but furtive felt like the minimum necessary in the hostile atmosphere) for which I was truly grateful as there was no way that I could have afforded the photocopying, even if I had been able to find a commercial printer prepared to take the risk. By this time I had myself become seriously paranoid about challenging the situation, and not without justification I fully believe. Indeed, even when writing these words and thinking about putting something written sixteen years ago on line, there is a certain hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach which wonders if I am actually signing my own death warrant. There are no Special Branch bodyguards outside my door as there were outside Salman Rushdie's, and as is obvious the 'crazy muslim' meter has gone well off the scale in recent years, and the justification of 'guilt' is not even a consideration for some self-righteous crazies before they pull the trigger. But I'm old enough now, and I've had cancer and a heart attack, and if God wants to take me in some brutal fashion I guess I'll have to face it. Hopefully not. I would actually quite like to finish IZWAYZ before I go, and get to make my Hajj, and maybe nowadays the crazies have got other things on their minds. Or perhaps this will just vanish in the way it did last time. For here we come to the part of the story that makes you wonder if your paranoid fantasies are indeed just a part of some great conspiracy theory. As I say, things were very scary at the time. So scary in fact, that I went to extraordinary lengths to make sure that nothing about what I had written could be traced back to me. Latex gloves to avoid fingerprints, tap-water not spittle to moisten the glue on the envelopes, stamps bought in England and the loaded envelopes posted there as well. And so my alternative way of seeing the book went out to everyone that I thought might be useful in spreading the word, or that was in a position of power to do something to change the situation. 

So it was posted to all the Conservative front-benchers and most of the Labour and Lib-Dem shadow cabinets and a few of the more quirky politicians who one might have expected to be more fearless than others, and all the daily newspapers and all the magazines that I thought relevant (not Football weekly and the like), and more than one person in every television and radio company to cover not only news and current affairs but also the people doing the chat shows, and it went to every University Department of English as well as Departments of Religious Studies, as well as the British Library and the Library of the House of Commons, and each person it was sent to had a personally addressed letter explaining what it was and how it might be relevant to them. And finally I felt that I had done what I could, and drove home and wondered about the morrow. I had no idea what might happen, but I felt sure that it was strong enough a statement that someone had to make something of it. After all, I had given some serious ammunition to anyone who felt the inclination to challenge some of the more loud mouthed muslims who were doing the media rounds, and let's face it the tabloids can make a huge story with virtually no ammunition at all, so one wondered what they would make of this. Anyway, I finally rested from my labours and waited for the outcome with baited breath. And then the strangest thing happened. Absolutely nothing. Not a word in any newspaper or magazine, or radio or TV programme. No questions in the House. Nothing. It was as though I had posted all those envelopes into a black hole, and things may have been personally scary before but the silence that ensued quickly became scarily weird. It was hard to believe that every single person on my mailing list had just glanced at what I'd sent and just consigned it immediately to the bin. Could it really have come across as the rantings of some deranged nutter considering the context of those who were appearing on the chat shows nearly every day? And having been so extraordinarily secretive in getting the thing out there, it was not even as if I could make any follow-up phone calls to anyone saying 'Did you get my letter?'. So, a year or so of living in the madness and three months of slaving over a hot keyboard had apparently come to absolutely nothing and I had to just get back on with my life. I'd done what I could and the only result was that things seemed even weirder than they did before. 

And then, I think about four days later, there was a rather strange story on the news. Salman Rushdie had met with a group of muslim clerics/leaders/whatevers in the Central Mosque in London and it appeared that there might be some kind of rapprochement, the format of which I don't recall exactly, but I like to think might have had something to do with what I'd had to say. It didn't last long. The atmosphere had apparently gone too far over the edge for anyone to drag it back. But he never did get assassinated, and eventually the powers that be seem to have decided to let him off the hook, and he seems to get out in public with comparative immunity from the death threats these days, for which I am grateful. But in the years that followed, on the few occasions that I have handed a muslim a copy of the Tyranny of Certainty to read, it has almost invariably been returned to me with a wordless gaze of what seems to be blank incomprehension that such an overwhelmingly accepted truth is actually open to serious challenge. The one muslim who had a different response was Zaki Badawi (now dead, and a sad loss to us all) who was visiting our house on one occasion, and when I handed it to him glanced at it briefly, smiled and handed it back saying 'the trouble with this is that it makes the muslims look like idiots', which makes me think that just maybe he had come across it before. I suppose my answer to that might have been 'but this was written by a muslim, and I don't think it comes across as having been written by an idiot, and there are plenty of non-idiot muslims in the world. Must they all keep quiet and let the idiots do the talking?' Or I could have said 'surely the muslims don't need me to make them look like idiots when they have made it perfectly clear that they are more than capable of doing that for themselves'. But in the event I didn't say either - I just laughed. Nowadays of course muslims living in the west have different and more pressing issues that overwhelm most others concerning their relationship with the societies in which they live. And I may be unsure whether I had anything to contribute to the Satanic Verses affair, but I have no doubt at all that the global scale of the War on Terror is way beyond my scope, and we will just have to trust that God knows best how He will shape the future of mankind. As for me, I'll just keep on trying to finish IZWAYZ in the hope that it can help a few muslim children living in the west to come to terms with their surroundings and find a way of living as muslims amidst the extraordinary changes to the world that God has planned.