So what if you’re offended?

A teacher has sued for discrimination because a colleague mentioned a “blasphemous” novel. This is where we are now.

Is discussing literature a form of harassment? That appears to be the view of Rabia Ihsan, a biology teacher who has just lost her tribunal in Glasgow after claiming that she was harassed at work by a colleague mentioning Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Apparently, one of her fellow teachers had said that she downloaded the novel after the author was almost murdered by a fanatic in August 2022. Ihsan took it personally and sued for discrimination.

That a novel of this calibre was being discussed in a staff room at all is rather reassuring. During my years as a teacher, I seem to recall that most of the break-time conversations revolved around why certain pupils were so irredeemably evil. I would much rather have exchanged reflections on The Satanic Verses and how it imaginatively reinterprets the foundational myths of Islam. That, after all, was the reason why its author had been issued with a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran.

Even those who have not read Rushdie’s novel will be aware of the furore. It is still a source of national shame that so many UK commentators at the time were endlessly debating whether Rushdie had ‘brought it on himself’ rather than outright condemning a foreign power that had threatened the life of a British citizen. It would have helped if more senior politicians had reminded everyone that novelists are free to write whatever they want, and death threats are not a legitimate form of literary criticism.

In other words, there are times when we simply need to be blunt, and this is particularly the case when it comes to the non-negotiable values of a liberal democracy. We failed the test in the late eighties at the time of the Rushdie affair, and we have been paying the price ever since. It’s the reason why Ihsan now feels emboldened to claim that she has been ‘harassed’ by the mere mention of a novel that she almost certainly has not read.

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