![Salman Rushdie]()
If
anything positive comes from the ghastly assault on Salman Rushdie, I
hope it is that we take his ideas, as well as his literature, with
profound seriousness © Reuters The
most shocking sentence I’ve read in the past week was printed in
Kayhan, a pro-regime Iranian newspaper, about the suspect in the
horrific stabbing of Salman Rushdie. “The hand of the man that tore the
neck of God’s enemy must be kissed,” it said. The headline in Khorasan,
another Iranian outlet, was “Satan on the way to hell.” Fortunately the
latter was inaccurate. Not only is Rushdie not the devil but it is clear
the 75-year-old writer will make it through this horrendous ordeal. I
await the newspaper’s correction. In addition to the fact Rushdie will
survive, one of the consolations to this barbaric act is our refreshing
lack of mealy-mouthiness in its condemnation. Those
old enough to remember the original fatwa, which was issued in 1989 by
Ayatollah Khomeini, will also recall the qualified censures of Iran’s
death sentence by many in the west. “Killing writers is terrible,” they
said (my paraphrase). “Rushdie’s novel was nevertheless gratuitously
offensive to devout believers.” We saw much the same semi-apologetic
response in 2015 to the Charlie Hebdo killers. Their outrage over the
cartoon depiction of the Prophet Mohammed was apparently understandable
even though we disapproved of cold-blooded murder. Thankfully the
Rushdie incident seems to have muted the forked tongues. For how long I
have no idea. I have no wish to improve on the FT’s excellent editorial
on the free speech effect of the Rushdie attack. But I want to
emphasise one aspect of it — Rushdie’s concern about the retreat of free
speech in the west, particularly the US. One of the most striking
things about the list of writers who signed a letter
— Rushdie was one of them — in Harper’s Magazine in 2020 in defence of
free speech, is how few are under the age of 40. Every form of
diversity, except age, is well represented among the names — race,
gender, politics, religion, sexual orientation etc. I fear the high
value we once placed on free speech is on the wane. Groups
such as the American Civil Liberties Union and PEN, which Rushdie once
headed, have become far more tentative and selective in their defence of
speech. It is increasingly common on both left and right to call for
the banning of certain books and to take extreme umbrage at speech that
is deemed offensive — a bar that seems to keep getting lower. In 2015,
French liberals coined the admirable hashtag “#JeSuisCharlie” in
response to the attack. In more normal moments we are perhaps better
captured by “#NousSommesTropFragile”. As the Harper’s letter put it:
“The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an
intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes
everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad
ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to
silence or wish them away.” If
anything positive comes from the ghastly assault on Rushdie, I hope it
is that we take his ideas, as well as his literature, with profound
seriousness. As for the man himself, I have met Rushdie a few times over
the years, initially in India, where I was based, and which was the
first country to ban The Satanic Verses in 1988 — a full six months before Iran. India also banned his next novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh
(1995), because of its lightly disguised lampooning of Bal Thackeray,
the Hindu nationalist firebrand, in the form of one of its main
characters, Raman Fielding. You
cannot accuse Rushdie of not being an equal opportunities offender. I
remember a joke from the time: “Have you heard Rushdie is coming out
with a new novel? It’s called Buddha you fat bastard.” I last interviewed him in 2017 when he brought out his most recent, but hopefully not his last, novel, The Golden House,
in which Rushdie does the same to Donald Trump as he had to Thackeray
in the book’s main character, The Joker, who terrorises Gotham. “The
Joker — his hair green and luminous with triumph, his skin white as a
Klansman’s hood, his lips dripping anonymous blood — now ruled them
all,” he wrote. On rereading the piece, I saw that I asked Rushdie about
his personal security. Tragically he seemed to think that the worst of
the threat was over. “I don’t think about my physical security,” he
said. “At least not anything that wouldn’t be done by anybody with a
well-known name trying to safeguard their privacy.” |