Medieval Salman Rushdie

 

"We", whoever that is, all know what the Middle Ages were like, don't "we"? They were nasty, brutish, and went on for ages. Anything after the Romans and before the Renaissance is the bad old Middle, right? You could call it "medieval"; everything smelled bad, minds and bodies were in a permanent state of plague, and the only known form of entertainment was killing, in all its most disgusting forms. See above for an expert reconstruction of what the world used to be like.

If you believe all this, and don't believe in the existence of cathedrals and Chaucer, congratulations – to borrow the words of Joseph Brodsky, "you're in The Empire, friend" – the empire of intellectual complacency. Or you've just mistaken Monty Python and the Holy Grail for real life. Medievalists – those who study the art and architecture, the literature, the politics and philosophy of this period, and therefore have a vested interest in arguing, quite bizarrely, that there may be more to it than that – will roll their eyes at you, but don't mind them. Let Salman Rushdie show you the way. . .

In print, commentary on the horror of the Charlie Hebdo murders must already run to a library's worth of heavy bound volumes. From Rushdie came this statement, which strains to earn a volume to itself. The first sentence of it runs:

"Religion, a mediaeval [sic] form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms."

As others have noticed (and yes, I've only just noticed that others have noticed), whatever one thinks of the rest of this opening line, its third word is a disputable choice, even one some people are willing to dispute amid the furious agreement and disagreement about what Rushdie goes on to say about "religious fundamentalism" and satire. (Not that Rushdie is alone in his misconception of what "medieval" means. I particularly like this comment on his comment, from the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog: "Religion is not a mediaeval form of unreason. Not reasoning well is mediaeval . . .".)

I was reminded that there's more than pedantry to the unthinking use of "medieval" as a pejorative at a superb colloquiuum I attended last autumn, at Queen Mary, University of London; the delegates were mainly postgraduate students and academics at an early stage in their career, and they were there to consider the question of public engagement – what "impact" could medieval studies have in print or on the radio? Their career prospects aside, it was obvious that running into the common assumption that they wre devoting their lives to the study of an era of "unreason" might be slightly irksome to them. I wonder what they would say now a well-known novelist has suggested that "religion, a medieval form of unreason" – that's "religion" as in Benedictine monks and "unreason" as in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, then – is more or less on a continuum with death by assault rifle, as appallingly seen in Paris on January 7, 2015.

While some pundits have criticized Rushdie for, say, equating "religion" with "fanaticism", a lot of people seem to have approved of his statement; and I can see why belatedly picking up on a seemingly minor verbal slip might seem irredeemably trivial. (But isn't the devil said to have a fondness for such minutiae?)

I wonder if more of the pundits would have noticed if religion had been described here as an ancient or even just a contemporary form of unreason (ah, those irrational theologians!). A historian might observe, too, that we owe more to those unwashed ancestors of ours than we care to acknowledge; even the not widely loved period between AD 400 and 700 remains "central to the modern European sense of identity", as Nicholas Vincent wrote in the TLS last summer. And years ago, a medievalist told me how weird and exasperating it was to see the word "medieval" constantly being deployed as a colloquialism that, quite childishly, just meant: all the bad things that are nothing to do with modernity. I said I wasn't sure; it sounded like the proverbial storm in a teacup. It's just a figure of speech, the historian admitted – conversation loves a cliché, you know – but isn't it a revealing one? Indeed, everybody can see what Rushdie was trying to say. "Medieval" means "pre-rationality, brutality and theocracy", OK?

Recently published books on subjects such as the refashioning of "archaic language" in the early seventeenth century and "comic medievalism" (to be reviewed in the TLS in the near future) invite the same sort of question. Why is it that "we" associate the worst of our own world and our own time with the long-gone past, and with people who aren't around to answer back?

Perhaps the answer is here, courtesy of The Conversation:

"First deployed in the Renaissance, the term 'medieval' was invented by scholars who wanted to celebrate the progress of their own age in contrast to the preceding centuries. Describing something as medieval has since endured as a successful form of negative branding."

In other words, by using this particular adjective, Rushdie is repeating one of the hoariest of rhetorical tricks, an exercise in "negative branding" as old as the writings of fifteenth-century historians such as Leonardo Bruni (but also, I am told, with considerably older roots; which means that one day perhaps it will be possible to speak of the "medieval Salman Rushdie"). To those in power, at any rate, its power remains undimmed – whichever side they're on.

If only the novelist had edited his statement so it read, more plainly, "unreason combined with weaponry is a threat to our freedoms". And since the world will never be free of "unreason", "weaponry is a threat to our freedoms" would do just as well. And while he's about it, he might as well drop "to our freedoms", which has a rather grandstanding ring to it. Weaponry is a threat. Then as now. Only some people don't like to admit as much. O tempora o mores, as a thirteenth-century lawyer might have said.