Islam and Controversy

Was Salman Rushdie right to have written The Satanic Verses ? Were the protestors right to have done so? What about the Danish cartoons? This book examines the moral questions raised by cultural controversies, and how intercultural dialogue might be generated within multicultural societies.

The book will examine controversies in a new way, marking a major departure from current literature on freedom of speech controversies, which have traditionally emphasized the legalistic over the ethical. This is the first book to look at several Muslim-related controversies together, and in a comparative perspective Using case studies of a number of (in)famous, inflammatory texts such as The Satanic Verses, The Jewel of Medina, the infamous Danish cartoons of Muhammed and the film Submission by Theo van Gogh, this book examines the moral questions raised by cultural controversies

Autorentext

Anshuman A. Mondal is Reader in English at Brunel University, UK. He is Chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association and member of the Multicultural Textualities collective. The author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity, Amitav Ghosh, and Young British Muslim Voices, he has published widely on contemporary Muslim identities and cultures, nationalism, and multiculturalism.

Inhalt
Acknowledgements Introduction PART I 1. From Blasphemy to Offensiveness: The Politics of Controversy 2. What is Freedom of Speech For? 3. A Difficult Freedom: Towards Mutual Understanding and the Ethics of Propriety PART II 4. The Self-Transgressions of Salman Rushdie: Re-Reading The Satanic Verses 5. Visualism and Violence: On the Art and Ethics of Provocation in the Jyllands-Posten Cartoons and Theo Van Gogh's Submission 6. Romancing the Other: The Jewel of the Medina and the Ethics of Genre PART III 7. Satire, Incitement and Self-Restraint: Reflections on Freedom of Expression and Aesthetic Responsibility in Contemporary Britain Notes Index