This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series The Persistence of Faith given by Jonathan Sacks

was originally broadcast in 1990.

Earlier this year, Harold Pinter delivered a public lecture, entitled Is Nothing Sacred?

It had been written not by Pinter, but by Salman Rushdie, who for security

reasons was unable to deliver it himself. Here was one of those charged moments in which we felt

the inescapable clash of two cultures, modernity and tradition, in the shape of an iconoclastic novelist and an

outraged Islam. At stake wasn't only the rarefied issue of blasphemy, but even the most fundamental

question of what words mean and what a book is. Throughout the controversy, Rushdie had argued that the satanic

verses was, after all, just a novel, in which words are intended neither to cohere with reality

nor to represent the views of their author. Muslims raised in a tradition of sacred texts,

saw the written word as altogether more freighted with significance.

A sentence is an entity in its own right,

and an author can't escape responsibility merely by invoking the conventions of the modern novel.

Who was right?

There was, of course, no answer,

not because the question was difficult,

but because the two cultures that addressed it

excluded one another.

In his lecture,

Rushty spoke directly to the theme of the novel in contemporary society.

It was, he said, a privileged arena, born in Carlos Fuentes' words,

...