Satanic Verses - 20 Years On

A few links from commentators marking the 20th anniversary of the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini against British writer Salman Rushdie over the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.

A brief summary of the issue from the BBC web site.

Lisa Appignanesi comments on the ban from a non-censorship perspective.

The legacy of the fatwa was to make public criticism of Islam as a religion politically and socially unacceptable, says Kenan Malik.

Interview with Salman Rushdie from 1990.

The Times of India on the challenges of publishing "offensive" books post-Rusdie.

Members of the Iranian Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Commission explain why they believe the fatwa is still in force and should be implemented.

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Thinking About Land Tax

Don't worry. I find tax boring and inscrutable as well. The arrival of any correspondence from Her Majesty's Inland Revenue inevitably causes me to want to throw myself under a train at the prospect of (a) having to fill in yet another tax form or (b) having to phone up my local office (located in Scotland for some reason) and explain for the 400th time why I do not in fact owe them any money, despite regular letters to the contrary.

Tax doesn't have to be taxing? Phaw!

Against that backdrop, I have found myself rather surprisingly drawn in recent weeks to the issue of Land Value Taxation, an idea espoused by (among others) the imaginatively named Land Value Taxation Campaign. The basic idea is that taxation should be levied annually on the rental value of land, replacing existing taxes on income and business.

I first stumbled upon the idea when a friend sent a link to a podcast by the "Renegade Economist" Fred Harrison, who in 1983 predicted the 1992 slump and who in 1997 predicted that the property price high point would be 2007 and would collapse in 2008 followed by recession in 2009/10.

My interest then took me to related sites, notably The Distributist Review and the Mutualist, the latter describing itself as espousing "free market anti-capitalism".

After that, I came across a piece by a former Sussex University friend Edward Rhodes on the pamphleteer Thomas Spence (1750-1814) who, along with his calls for universal adult suffrage (including voting rights for women) was an advocate of a system of taxation based on the value of land linked to the corresponding abolition of taxation on income and trade.

Time and inclination permitting, I may explore the theme in future posts. For now, I commend the links if interested in exploring the idea further.

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Dubliners, James Joyce

I love Joyce's ability to tell us all we need to know about his characters through a brief description of their physical features.

Examples abound:

His breeches, his white rubber shoes and his jauntily slung waterproof expressed youth. But his figure fell into rotundity at the waist, his hair was scant and grey and his face, when the waves of expression had passed over it, had a ravaged look.

(Two Gallants)



Mrs. Mooney was a butcher's daughter..... She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat ...

He was a shabby stooped little drunkard with a white face and a white moustache white eyebrows, pencilled above his little eyes, which were veined and raw...

Polly was a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small full mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her look like a little perverse madonna.

( All from The Boarding House)


Mr. Alleyne, a little man wearing gold-rimmed glasses on a cleanshaven face, shot his head up over a pile of documents. The head itself was so pink and hairless it seemed like a large egg reposing on the papers.

(Counterparts)

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Imagining Greener Cities

Reading James Joyce's Dubliners at the moment, I am struck by his descriptions of the city. In particular, his anecdotes about the relationship between buildings and green spaces is of interest.

Examples abound. The tall trees that line the mall with the sunlight slanting through them onto the water; crossing the Liffy in a ferryboat; a wide field in Ringsend (all in An Encounter).

In Araby, we are introduced to houses with apples trees in their back gardens, muddy lanes, cottages and stables

"where a coachman smoothed or combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness."

Eveline is set against the backdrop of residential development:

"One time there used to be a field in which they used to play every evening....Then a man from Belfast bought the field and built houses in it."

Dublin at the turn of the twentieth century had missed out on much of the industrial development enjoyed further north in Belfast, and had therefore suffered economically. This was one factor in explaining the unique way that the city's infrastructure developed during the period before the Easter Rising of 1916.

Am reminded while reading of the stories told by an old local resident (in his 90's) who remembers my current neighbourhood in north Bristol when much of it was an English meadow in which he and his friends had riverside picnics. He also recalls that the three mile journey to the city centre was by tram or bicycle, partly through open fields.

On a tangential note, I remember talking with an old Finnish missionary several years ago while visiting Bangkok. Arriving in the city just after the Second World War, he remembers elephants working inside the city limits and only three bridges crossing the Chao Phrya River in a city which he described as essentially a collection of villages linked by boats.

Of course, none of this romanticising of the past means that these cities were necessarily healthier places to live than are cities today. However, in an age "addicted to oil" (to quote President Bush) it is often difficult to imagine cities without vast numbers of cars and building developments that dwarf and sometimes replace residential communities which have evolved over centuries. Drawing on the experiences of older people, and reading stories of urban life in a previous age, can be a means of fuelling the imagination and helping us to think creatively about the way that urbanisation in the C21 could work for us with reduced car use and oil dependency.

At least, that's what these people think.

Incidentally, in 2003, a BBC poll voted Dublin as the best European capital city to live in.

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