Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died in June 1989, just months after issuing a fatwa ordering the assassination of Salman Rushdie and everyone else involved in the publication of his novel. the satanic verses. Fatwas cannot be rescinded posthumously, which is why, ever since, this fatwa has hung in the air like a putrid odor, inhaled deeply for inspiration by devoted followers of Khomeini and his successors. On Friday, a man stabbed Rushdie in upstate New York. The suspect is 24 years old, he is from New Jersey and is reportedly an admirer of the Iranian theocratic government. “The news is not good,” Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement. Rushdie was hit in the liver and will probably lose an eye. On Saturday night, Rushdie was reportedly off his respirator and talking.
The honorable response is to say that we are all Rushdie now, and that America’s failure to protect him is a collective shame. In the face of this bullying, Rushdie’s work should be publicly read, and his name thrown in the face of apologists for the regime he once ordered and offered to pay for his assassination. (In 1998, in an effort to normalize relations with the West, Iran called off the attack but made it clear that if any freelancers wanted to catch them, Tehran would not be upset.)
But we are not all Rushdie. And indeed, the last two decades have led me to wonder if some of us are more Khomeini than we’d like to admit.
In 1989, the reaction to the fatwa was divided into three: some supported it; some opposed; and some opposed to be sure, but he still wanted everyone to know how bad Rushdie and his novel were. This latter faction, Team To Be Sure, criticized the West for elevating this troublesome man and insulting him, whose evil might have been prevented if others had been more attuned to the sensibilities of those offended.
The fumes continue to come out of this last group. Former President Jimmy Carter was, at the time of the original fatwa, the most prominent American to suggest that the crime of murder should be balanced against Rushdie’s crime of blasphemy. The Ayatollah’s death sentence “caused writers and public officials in Western nations to be concerned almost exclusively with copyright,” Carter wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Okay, yes. Carter not only said that many Muslims were offended and desired violence against Rushdie; that was simply a matter of fact, frequently reported on the news pages. He took to the opinion page to add his opinion that these fans were right. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” he wrote, “we tend to promote him and his book without acknowledging that it is a direct insult to those millions of Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Never mind that millions of Muslims are not at all offended and insulted by the suggestion that they should.
During the last two decades, our culture has been carterized. We have granted moral authority to howling mobs, and the louder the howls, the more we have agreed that they were worth paying attention to. Novelist Hanif Kureishi has said that “no one would have the balls” to write the satanic verses This day. More precisely, no one would publish it, because sensitive readers would notice the theological finesse of the book’s title and plot. The ayatollahs have trained them well, and the social media disasters of the past few years have reinforced the lesson: Don’t publish books that get you criticized, either by semi-literate fans on the other side of the world or semi-literate fans on this one.
It’s unfair to pick on Carter, because many who have fewer excuses for these outrageous views have agreed with him. These include professional writers. (Carter is a writer and a poet, but his writing is more of an unfortunate hobby than a real calling.) Like Carter, these writers have condemned murder, to be surebut he hastened to change the subject to the apparently equally urgent problem of the victims’ own sins.
In 2015, after jihadists killed eight staff members of charliehebdoPEN America, a venerable institution that promotes the interests of writers and freedom of expression, once led by Salman Rushdie himself, presented the survivors with an award for their bravery. They had been warned by fans for years that they would be killed for their cartoons, but they published them anyway. After the massacre, hundreds of PEN members, led by Teju Cole and Francine Prose, doubted whether they deserved an award and objected in a judgmental and scathing open letter. (I joined PEN that year, and where the application asked for my reasons, I wrote “to cancel the vote of Joyce Carol Oates,” another signer.)
Today, with Rushdie cut to shreds in a hospital bed in Erie, it is impossible to read their letter without noticing how completely they surrendered to this cult of offense and sided with the offended against the murdered.
how awful that charliehebdo artists and writers were shot to death, the signatories said. But should we really applaud to them? “There is a critical difference between wholeheartedly supporting expression that violates what is acceptable,” they wrote, “and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.” They then proceeded to explain (later, to be surea statement that mass murder is not acceptable) that charlie hebdo’The ridicule of the “marginalized, besieged and victimized” was also not acceptable. In 1989, Team To Be Sure had betrayed their philistinism by reducing Rushdie’s novel, one of the best by a living writer, to an “insult.” PEN’s critics of charliehebdo he stated that his “caricatures of the Prophet must be seen as intended to cause further humiliation and suffering”. The letter did not even try to criticize charliehebdo for literary reasons.
It takes courage to describe the artists and journalists who were recently shot in the face as causing “suffering” themselves. Doing this as a member of PEN America speaks to a further fading of the culture, in its belief that people’s freedom is worth fighting and dying for. (I note that since the attempt on Rushdie’s life, hardly anyone has made these arguments. I’m not sure why successfully killing several cartoonists who despise religion becomes to be sure treatment, but trying to kill a novelist who despises religion does not. In any case I welcome to the ranks of the sensible whoever wants to join.)
VS Naipaul called Khomeini’s fatwa “an extreme form of literary criticism,” a macabre joke that at the time seemed to come at Rushdie’s expense. It sounds just as macabre today, but it hits a more worthy target: those who blur the distinction between offense and violence, and between a disagreement over ideas and a disagreement over whether your head should stay attached to your body.
Now that Rushdie’s head has been partially severed, and on American soil, I hope that these distinctions need no further elaboration, and that those who elided them swallow their share of shame. Rushdie has survived long enough to see free speech demeaned in the name of free speech. Survive a little longer, Salman, and we will see how this cause is restored to the status it deserves.
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