Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel literature laureate, is the subject of a hysterical interview with the American website, The Daily Beast (formerly Newsweek), where he accuses British Muslims of creating “breeding grounds” for “Islamic terrorists.” He also unfavorably compared them to the Nation of Islam, the black American Muslim sect.

Soyinka goes on about how the Nation of Islam is “a kind of mainstream Muslim institution.”  I don’t know where he got that information as any of his literary friends (Henry Louis Gates for one) could have told him that the Nation is hardly mainstream; not even among African-Americans, where some blame NOI members for murdering Malcolm X.  Most black Muslims in the US follow orthodox Sunni teachings. In any case, Soyinka prefers the Nation of Islam over European Muslims: “The Muslims there are open Muslims, whereas in Europe they tend to go into ghetto schools.” The class snobbery couldn’t be clearer.  Soyinka’s point about British Muslims had to do with him wanting to blame Britain for a Nigerian Muslim who had become radicalized and tried to blow up a plane in the U.S.  For him, the British are too liberal and that they have too much freedom. In the process, Soyinka exposes himself as anti-communist: “(Britain’s) social logic is to allow all religions to preach openly. But this is illogic, because none of the other religions preach apocalyptic violence. And yet England allows it. Remember, that country was the breeding ground for communism, too. Karl Marx did all his work in libraries there.”

Read it for yourself.

Though Soyinka has been called an “orientalist” for his views of Islam by some of his critics and interlocutors, he  has also preached religious tolerance and has been factual in his condemnation of extreme religious practice, whether by Christians or Muslims, in Nigeria. That said, his latest comments are jarring.

Soyinka was interviewed for the Daily Beast by Tunku Varadarajan, a British journalist born in India, who has his own brush with Islamophobia. After a Muslim American soldier killed 13 of his colleagues on an army base in Texas in November last year, Varadarajan, trying to be clever, wrote a column for Forbes describing the killings as “going Muslim,” an offensive play on the phrase “going postal.” The latter refers to a state of uncontrolled violence and rage. At the time Varadarajan was on the faculty of New York University. The university administration called his article “offensive.” An academic at Columbia University, on the other side of Manhattan called out colleagues like Varadarajan:

“… With PhDs and daunting lists of academic publications to their names, academics are perceived to carry the weighty, objective backing of “knowledge” and “science” by the lay-public, so bigoted, ignorant opinions on their parts are taken as justification to those who already hold skewed perspectives and hateful opinions about Islam and Muslims. Thus these academic dogmatists cloak (perhaps under their PhD hoods) the fire of Islamophobia with the cool, measured tones of objectivity …”

Soyinka is now guilty of this too.