Critical Quarterly has tried over the past two decades to weave into its concerns with the

range of culture, both canonical and

contemporary, a constant reference to the development of a society which is multi-ethnic. As part of that process, it published the
brilliant short story by Hanif Kureishi called ‘My Son, the Fanatic’, later developed into a very moving film. If one ever wished for
proof of the uncanny prescience of the literary imagination, it came on 7 July 2005 in London when four young men very similar to
Kureishi’s ‘son’ blew themselves and fifty-two others to death on London’s public transport.
10 Critical Quarterly cannot hope to mount the public inquiry which is so necessary and which this government has refused. One
question such an inquiry would need to ask is how much attention was paid to Kureishi’s warnings, and how many young men and
women of Pakistani origin had been recruited by secret service and police in an attempt to monitor the developments to which he
had alerted us. An even more difficult question for this tawdry and mendacious government to ask is whether the sending of troops
to Iraq against the overwhelming wishes of the British people was, to use Aristotle’s categories, the proximate cause of this tragedy.
What turned Kureishi’s fanatics into murderers?
 To answer such questions needs massive investigative resources, but there are other questions, some almost as pressing,
which need little more than a table to sit round and the goodwill of those prepared to try and talk honestly about topics now
freighted with so many weasel words. There seems little doubt, for example, that racial divisions are worsening in London schools
and have been for at least five years. More anecdotally, the residual racism of the white working class is waxing rather than waning.
20 Just before Christmas 2005, CQ gathered around a table writers Monica Ali, Hanif Kureishi and Salman Rushdie, academics Paul
Gilroy and Colin MacCabe and teachers Natasha Serret and Sandra Young to discuss these matters. Paul Carlin, who recorded the
conversation, and Kate Hext, who transcribed it, also contributed.
Some of the wider contexts and questions about a multi-ethnic and multicultural society were very ably articulated by Salman
Rushdie in a short paper that he wrote in preparation for the seminar, which we here republish.

Multiculturalism has always been an embattled idea but the battle has grown fiercer of late. In this, as in so many other
things, it is terrorism that is setting the agenda, goading us and forcing us to respond: terrorism, whose goal it is to turn the
differences between us into divisions and then to use those divisions as justifications. No question about it: it’s harder to celebrate
30 the virtues of polyculture when even Belgian women are being persuaded by Belgians ‘of North African descent’ to blow themselves
– and other people – up. Comedians, among others, have been trying to defuse (wrong verb) people’s fears by facing up to them:
‘My name’s Shazia Mirza, or at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.’ But it will take more than comedy to calm things down.
Britain, the most determinedly ‘multiculturist’ of European nations, is at the heart of the debate. According to some opinion
polls, the British people avowed their continued support for multiculturalism even in the immediate aftermath of the 7 July
bombings; many commentators, however, have been less affirmative. David Goodhart, editor of Prospect magazine, asks the old
philosophical question – ‘Who is my brother?’ – and suggests that an overly diverse society may become an unsustainable one.
Britain’s first black archbishop, Dr John Sentamu, accuses multiculturalism of being bad for English national identity. And the British
government announces that new citizens will have to pass a ‘Britishness test’ from now on: a passport will be a kind of driving license
proving you’ve learned the new rules of the nationalist road.
40 At the other end of the spectrum, Karen Chouhan of the 1990 Trust, a ‘black-led’ human rights organisation, insists that ‘We
need to move forward with a serious debate about how far we have to go in tackling race discrimination in every corner of society,
not move it back by forcing everyone to be more (white) British’. And Professor Bhikhu Parekh redefines multiculturalism as the
belief that ‘no culture is perfect or represents the best life and that it can therefore benefit from a critical dialogue with other
 cultures ... Britain is and should remain a vibrant and democratic multicultural society that must combine respect for diversity with
shared common values’.
It’s impossible for someone like myself, whose life was transformed by an act of migration, to be entirely objective about the
value or otherwise of such acts. I have spent much of my writing life celebrating the potential for creativity and renewal of the
cultural encounters and frictions that have become commonplace in our much-transplanted world. Then again, as people keep
pointing out, I have a second axe to grind, because the Satanic Verses controversy was a pivotal moment in the forging of a British
50 Muslim identity and political agenda. I did not fail to note the ironies: a secular work of art energised powerful communalist, anti-
secularist forces, ‘Muslim’ instead of ‘Asian’. And yes, as a result, the argument about multiculturalism has become, for me, an
internal debate, a quarrel in the self.
Nor am I alone. The me´lange of culture is in us all, with its irreconcilable contradictions. In our swollen, polyglot cities (‘the
locus classicus of incompatible realities’, one of the characters in The Satanic Verses calls them), we are all cultural mestizos, and the
argument within rages to some degree in us all. So it is important to make a distinction between multifaceted culture and
multiculturalism. In the age of mass migration and the internet, cultural plurality is an irreversible fact, like globalisation; like it or
dislike it, it’s where we live, and the dream of a pure monoculture is at best an unattainable, nostalgic fantasy, and at worst a life-
threatening menace – when ideas of purity (racial purity, religious purity, cultural purity) turn into programmes of ‘ethnic cleansing’,
for example, or when Hindu fanatics in India attack the ‘inauthenticity’ of Indian Muslim experience, or when Islamic ideologues
60 drive young people to die in the service of ‘pure’ faith, unadulterated by compassion or doubt. ‘Purity’ is a slogan that leads to
segregations and explosions. Let us have no more of it. A little more impurity, please; a little less cleanliness; a little more dirt. We’ll
all sleep easier in our beds.
Multiculturalism, however, has all too often become mere cultural relativism, a much less defensible proposition, under cover
of which much that is reactionary and oppressive – of women, for example – can be justified. The British multiculturalist idea of
different cultures peacefully coexisting under the umbrella of a vaguely defined pax Britannica was seriously undermined by the 7
July bombers and the disaffected ghetto culture from which they sprang. Of the other available social models, the one-size-fits-all
homogenising of ‘full assimilation’ seems not only undesirable but unachievable, and what remains is the ‘core values’ approach to
which Parekh alludes, and of which the ‘Britishness test’ is, at least as presently proposed, a grotesque comic parody.
When we, as individuals, pick and mix cultural elements for ourselves, we do not do so indiscriminately, but according to our
70 natures. We, too, must retain the ability to discriminate, to reject as well as to accept, to value some things above others, and to
insist on the acceptance of those values by all their members. This is the question of our time: how does a fractured community of
multiple cultures decide what values it must share in order to cohere, and how can it insist on those values even when they clash
with some citizens’ traditions and beliefs?
 The beginnings of an answer may be found by asking the question the other way around: what does a society owe to its
citizens? The French riots demonstrate a stark truth. If people do not feel included in the national idea, their alienation will
eventually turn to rage. Karen Chouhan and others are right to insist that issues of social justice, racism and deprivation need
urgently to be addressed. If we are to build a plural society on the foundation of what unites us, we must face up to what divides. But
the questions of core freedoms and primary loyalties can’t be ducked. No society, no matter how tolerant, can expect to thrive if its
citizens don’t prize what their citizenship means – if, when asked what they stand for as Frenchmen, as Indians, as Americans, as
80 Britons, they cannot give clear replies.

SALMAN RUSHDIE