The Evening Standard (Palmerston North, New Zealand)
May 24, 2005, Tuesday

A tale of three books

by HAWES Peter

A New Zealand citizen, dearly beloved by several other New
Zealanders, is incarcerated in a toiletless yurt somewhere on the
Silk Road and living, one assumes, in a state of some perturbation.

HIS name is Gareth Morgan, a business consultant and rider of large
motorcycles — one of which drove him into the central Asian region
that is presently his prison.

Coincidentally, his plight came to public notice at the same time as
we learnt of outraged Muslims stampeding round dusty medinas,
slaughtering anyone who looked likely to have supported the new Bush
initiative of throwing Korans down the bog to wreak distress and
dismay amidst the surviving suicide bombers in Guantanamo Bay.

And these two stories reminded me of a story of my own, which I may
call The Tale of Three Books — an apt title, given that it involves
the three groups who make up the people of the book — to whit, the
Christians, Jews and Muslims of the world. All of whom are loosely
identical and distinguished only by their searing hatred of each
other.

They have all absorbed and regurgitated, in their own terms, the
Egyptian myth of Horus, a bloke who keeps dying on behalf of the
human race and being divinely recycled back into existence.

And all have defended — with humourless intensity — their own
version of the story. (It gives me the willies sometimes to think
that as a religious sceptic I am an Infidel, a Heretic and an
Unbeliever all at once. . . plus thinking the original Horus yarn is
a load of old bollocks as well. Oh the omniscience of atheism — how
many times can an individual go to hell?)

Anyway, the first of the three books in my story is The Satanic
Verses by Salman Rushdie, which I purchased at Foyles bookshop,
Tottenham Court Road, London, just days before it was fatwa’d by the
Ayatollah Khomeini.

A fatwa is, of course, an Islamic sentence of death on behalf of a
loving God.

You may, for example, be fatwa’d for saying that fatwas on behalf of
loving Gods are oxymoronic, but as neither Khomeini nor the loving
God have a bloody clue what oxymoron means, they won’t see the irony.

Rushdie had said something along these lines in his verses and a
cordial invitation had been extended to all true Muslim believers to
murder him on sight.

The second book was The Passion of the Christ, the novelisation of an
ardent fantasy dreamed by the king of the Jews while he hung about on
the cross.

It was by a Greek chap named Kasanstakis, and I bought it at Athens
airport to read on a flight I was making to Turkey.

Which was a serious tactical error, because I was still reading it as
I queued up at Istanbul customs — where I learned that Kasanstakis
was an impassioned critic of Turkey’s Armenian policy (which was to
murder them on sight).

I learned this from a Turkish customs official who snatched the book
from me, bellowed that Turkey had never had such a policy, and that I
would suffer the fate of the average Armenian in the street if the
book was ever seen on my person in Turkey again.

Which he then handed back to me; presumably in the hope I would be
murdered on sight by the first Turk who saw me reading a book saying
Armenians were murdered on sight.

So, there’s two of the books in this story. Which is true, by the
way.

The third came into my possession thus: I had booked into a decent
hotel in Istanbul for one night — just long enough to give me time
to check out the much cheaper dives that I would frequent from then
on in.

During my sojourn in this reasonable hotel, I found a Gideon Koran.

Yep, believe it or not folks, the Gideon Society not only do Bibles,
but a very nice line in mutely green-covered, rice-papered Korans
too.

There it was, in the top drawer, next to the phone book.

So, I pinched it, to show people like you how kind and
multi-denominational the Gideons are.

Thus it was in my rucksack, along with the other two books, when I
arrived in a town called Goreme, in Cappadocia.

This region used to be called Asia Minor in the days of St Paul —
who, incidentally, brought Christ’s mum over with him and set her up
in a house just down the road from Santa Claus in Ephesus. (Check it
out.)

The best description of Goreme is probably wild western, with
facilities akin to those Gareth Morgan is currently experiencing.

My hotel-thing had no sheets, water, booze, towels, women, lights or.
. . toilet paper!

But don’t forget, I had three books.

Which one did I use?

That’s between God, Jehovah, Allah — and me.