Ethan Casey discusses the absence of critical analysis in so called western liberal writers such as Sulam Rushdie. This article was first published by The Jung, Pakistan.

Reading Salman Rushdie makes me feel queasy. I don't mean his novels, which I've never read. Many people have told me that I must read Midnight's Children, and one day I will, Inshallah. His new novel, Shalimar the Clown, is being acclaimed. Since I have no firsthand experience on which to base a judgment, I'm willing to posit that Rushdie is an excellent, possibly even a great novelist. And I don't think anyone should have to live through the isolation, danger and opprobrium that he suffered during the 1990s.

All that said, I find him at best a mediocre political thinker and (that meaningless catch-all moniker) "commentator", and arguably a pernicious one. Liberal Western papers wheel him out from time to time as a kind of poster child, to say and write things that make them feel good about being liberal and Western. He is (or was) a Muslim; he's Asian; yet he's "one of us". If only more of "them" were more like him.

In a piece I've just got round to reading in the June 25 issue of the Guardian Review, Rushdie riffs on the old saw that truth is the first casualty of war. "'Let the facts speak for themselves,' historians, politicians and columnists like to say, but facts do not speak; they must be interpreted and spoken for," he writes. "And then, according to Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle', what is observed is altered by the observer's presence. Facts shift, depending on who is interpreting them."

Rushdie goes on to argue that, to do with America, there exist "conservative facts", "liberal facts", and "non-American facts". The last of these, he aptly writes, are based on a sense among many -- billions? -- worldwide that "the US has been giving itself too many good reviews lately".

Fair enough. But then he shows his hand by slipping into a kind of language with which we've become familiar in recent years, deployed by ostensibly liberal American and Amerophile writers -- identifiable ones such as Paul Berman, Ian Buruma, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff -- who, in shameful obeisance to naked power, rushed to excuse the Iraq war and have been hemming and hawing ever since. "I have some sympathy with all three 'biases'," writes Rushdie. "Self-investigation followed by self-exoneration is never convincing. However, it's hard to work up genuine sympathy for a failure of niceties towards people who would never consider upholding such niceties in return - to stick up for the human rights of people who despise the idea of human rights."

Whatever! Salman Rushdie and others like him in the liberal West want to have their cake and eat it. They're willing to acknowledge, as a politician or military bureaucrat might put it, that "abuses have occurred" on the Western side, but ultimately they want to locate evil east and south of themselves.

Much more interesting to me is the hard-won wisdom of a Pakistani friend with whom I had a long conversation in late 2003. "Ethan, I accept the point that there is a totalitarianism in Islam," said my friend. "There is that. Islam's contention that the Quran is the last message, and that that is the be-all and end-all, is really going to be the battlefield, in my view. Look at it this way: the Jews say they're the chosen people. Islam says it's the final message. The Christians rule the roost. Where does the answer lie?" "Um ..."

"It's a facetious question. The answer actually doesn't lie in any of them. ... This knife-edge we live on today is because everyone sees the successes, nobody sees the failures. Nobody is willing to see the failures. And for every success, there are hundreds of failures. And television plays such a big part in it: when you're sitting every night in front of the TV, and it's spewing out this stuff, and you get the sense that this is the centre of things, this is where it's at. You don't know how many ways I prefer living here to living in the West. At least you're not bombarded with ads. There's no pressure to keep up. To be upper middle class in Pakistan is to be more independent than in 99 per cent of places today, as long as you can keep away from the mythology. The way I see it, all sides are crazy."

"So as an individual," I asked, "what should the response be?"

"As an individual, I think the response is to isolate yourself. But as a society -- let's say it's a melting pot. The various elements in that melting pot have to combine. That's the only hope I see. I really think the world can't take opposing ideologies much longer. And what the West needs to realise is that the ideology that's doing the most damage is not Islam, it's Zionism."

Ethan Casey's book Alive and Well in Pakistan: A Human Journey in a Dangerous Time is available in Pakistan and India Email: pecasey@mindspring.com

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