The furore over the knighthood awarded to Salman Rushdie has not passed me by, I am just shocked by it all and for once I don't think I can agree with either side.

No really, I am serious, I have no firm opinion on this matter.

As far as I see it Salman Rushdie was given shelter in this country from an essentially oppressive regime which wished/wishes to restrict freedom of speech and thought. It manifested this desire by issuing a fatwa {sometimes spelt fatwah} which called for Rushdie's death and even offered a bounty. This was in response to a novel he wrote in 1988.
Clearly this is an action which is against all natural concepts of civil liberty and the oft-cited human rights.

Of course the problem is that the people who called for his death weren't Nazis or Communists or any of the other groups whom it is acceptable to loathe. No, this particular ridiculous overreaction to a work of fiction eminated from the Islamic leader of Iran, who clearly has nothing to do with a British-Indian novelist. Still, Rushdie had to hide in Britain, at I imagine some cost to the taxpayer, for ten years.

Rushdie's contribution to literature and the issues surrounding free speech are well known and respected, but here's the problem - he's been doing it for years, why choose to knight him now?!

Instincts tell me to support the knighthood and condemn the frankly comic overreaction of the Muslim world. Burning effigies of Rushdie are a gift to people who do not believe the words of the senior clerics of that religion who constantly {but without much success it seems} tell the British media that Islam is a religion of peace. Burning effigies of the Queen are even more hilarious as it shows the total lack of comprehension of how the honours system works in this nation and is just mindlessly offensive in a way that cannot even claim some semblance of art as The Satanic Verses did.

However, here my dilemma begins - Why has Rushdie's name been put forward? Who made the choice and why was it allowed to stand at a time when relations with the Islamic world are so very tense?

Perhaps it was the action of a Civil Service who felt weakened by the Government's lacklustre performance with the kidnapped servicemen and woman in the waters off Iraq. I don't know, all I do know is that it has played straight into the hands of fundamentalists. They now have further material to pump into the heads of the young men they are undoubtedly training somewhere to blow themselves up for the glorification of a religion. A religion with a worldly incarnation which is increasingly regarded as unstable across a wide portion of the globe.

Knowing this, as I'm sure the administration does, if one death occurs as a result of this knighthood I will find it difficult to exculpate our own people. The timing is terrible and something which should have been a positive strike for freedom of expression on all sides looks like becoming an excuse for barbarism and opression.