worship differently, to think differently, they would no
longer be constrained by the totalitarian rules of Islam
(this total and unchanging way of living). Understanding
why Muslims are so desperate to keep secret the
significance of the Satanic verses is key to understanding
the totalitarian nature of Islam.
In Islam difference and choice must not be allowed:
only living as Islam prescribes is valid, the rules of Islam are
the source of all authority, any dissent is to be crushed:
Muslims cannot vary their lives from the strictures without
ceasing to be Muslims and thus inviting murder from other
Muslims. The issue behind The Rushdie Affair is key for the
people in the West: Muslims are never going to stop being
Muslims and are never going to worship anything other than
Allah, the only god and the only source of authority for
Muslims. Explaining why Sunni Muslims in Britain were
prepared to follow a religious edict to kill Rushdie, an
edict issued by their arch-enemies the Shia Muslims in
Iran, would have enabled the electorate in democracies
across the West to decide: do we really want any more of
this unbending ideology and its foot-soldiers in our
society? Instead, the elite in the West pretended that the
issue of the Satanic verses was a storm-in-a-teacup and
that the death threat to Rushdie ended years ago, when in
fact the threat to the author continues to the present
day.^306
The opportunity to educate the electorate about Islam
was abandoned. Instead the dogma about multiculturalism
was promoted in the aftermath of the crisis, in an attempt to
stop the people in the West from objecting to this alien creed