Salman Rushdie interview with Prof Gauri Vishwanathan of Columbia on 04 Jun 10

Relativism is the death of liberalism.

How is it possible to argue for the universality of certain rights like the right to language, to dream and to imagine?

Religion comes after reason and that actually religious texts were invented and Gods indeed were invented to answer the two questions of life, where did we come from and how shall we live?

Its great shame in the world of Islam that so much interesting contemporary scholarship about the origins of Islam is not acceptable and the reason it’s not acceptable is because of insistence on the divine origin of the text.

“Ibn Rush’d” a philosopher known to west as “Averroes” in 12^th century tried to fight the literalist interpretation of the Quran and did so with great brilliance and scholarship but as we can now see from the history of the world, lost the battle. He said that if you look at the Judeo-Christian definition of God, It differs from the Muslim definition of God.  It differs from the Muslim definition in one important particular, which is that the Jews and Christian say that man was “created by God in his own image”.  And what the sentence clearly suggests is that there is some relationship between the nature of man and the nature of God- “created in his own image”. Islam says the opposite.  Islam says that God has no human qualities.  He has divine qualities. 

And so, Ibn Rush’d argued that language is also a human quality, and that therefore it was unreasonable to suggest that God spoke Arabic because God presumably spoke “God”. And as a result when the archangel-even if you believe the story literally appears on the mountain and delivers the message.  The Prophet understanding it in Arabic is already making an act of interpretation. He is already taking something that arrives in non linguistic form and understanding it linguistically.  He takes something that arrives as a divine message and transforms it into human compression.  And so it was argued.  If the original act of receiving the text is already an act of interpretation then further interpretation is clearly legitimate.

If you justify anything that anybody does because it comes from their tradition,  It means you abdicate your moral sense and you cease to be a moral being.