CULTURE-USA: Coming To Terms with Muslim Sentiments

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

WASHINGTON, Feb 21 1995 (IPS) - In the eyes of a prominent U.S. media mogul, the theme song to ‘The Flintstones’ could attract the wrath of Muslims worldwide.

That, at least, seems to be the reason why Ted Turner, the Atlanta TV executive who owns Cable News Network (CNN) and other cable channels, refused to relinquish the rights to the Flintstone’s anthem for use in British author Salman Rushdie’s new book.

‘East, West’ (published here by Viking), contains a charming, and essentially non-religious, story called ‘The Courter’ in which a couple in India find they have something in common because they both have watched the popular Flintstones cartoon.

The British edition of the story contains the lyrics to the song: “Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!/ They’re a modern Stone Age family …” Presumably, not the sort of lines that Iran’s ayatollahs would find offensive, or even sensible.

But for the U.S. edition, those lyrics are not included, because the Turner Broadcasting System (TBS), which owns the rights to the show, refused to grant permission for them to be reprinted.

TBS executives would only say that they reserved the right to deny permission for such rights, and had not been consulted about the usage of the passage until ‘East, West’ came out in Europe.

That response seemed disingenuous to the Indian-born Rushdie, who has remained in hiding for six years since the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued an edict calling for his death because of what he deemed blasphemy in the 1988 novel ‘The Satanic Verses’.

Calling the reasons the rights to the song were denied “bull s— “, Rushdie, speaking in London, wondered what Turner was so scared about. “Do they think (the Iranians) are going to put a contract out on Fred Flintstone?”

That may be not too far from the truth. In the years since Khomeini’s Feb. 14, 1989 edict instructing loyal Muslims to kill Rushdie for ‘The Satanic Verses’, the book’s Scandinavian translator was killed and its Japanese translator wounded.

In the United States, it took years before the book was published in paperback, by a group that only called itself ‘The Consortium’. Every major publisher had passed it by for fear of offending Rushdie’s Muslim opponents.

The Flintstones fiasco thus becomes the latest chapter in a bizarre series of attempts by the U.S. media and culture industry to come to term with Muslim sensitivities. (MORE)

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