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alman Rushdie had wondered in recent years whether the public was losing its appetite for free speech, a principle on which he staked his life when Iran sought to have him killed for his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses.” As Rushdie told The Guardian last year, “The kinds of people who stood up for me in the bad years might not do so now.” Two years ago Salman Rushdie joined prominent cultural figures signing an open letter decrying an increasingly “intolerant climate” and warning that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.” It was a declaration of principles Mr. Rushdie had embodied since 1989, when a fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, calling for his murder, made him a reluctant symbol of free speech. The letter, published by Harper’s Magazine in June 2020 after racial justice protests swept the United States, drew a backlash, with some denouncing it as a reactionary display of thin-skinnedness and privilege — signed, as one critic put it, by “rich fools.” |
“The novel, ‘The Satanic Verses,’ continues to be published,” he said. But “the argument at the heart of their claim, that it is wrong to give offense to certain people, certain groups, certain religions, and so on, has become much more mainstream.” “To a degree,” he said, “you could say that many societies have internalized the fatwa and introduced a form of self-censorship in the way we talk about each other.”
The American writer David Rieff suggested on Twitter that “The Satanic Verses” would run afoul of “sensitivity readers” if it were submitted to publishers today. “The author would be told that words are violence — just as the fatwa said,” he wrote. When “The Satanic Verses” was published in 1988, the battle lines over free speech were not as neat as some may remember. The novel, which fictionalized elements of the life of the Prophet Muhammad with depictions that offended many Muslims and were labeled blasphemous by some, inspired sometimes violent protests around the world, including in India, where at least a dozen people were killed in 1989 after the police fired at Muslim demonstrators in Mumbai, where Mr. Rushdie had been born into a prosperous liberal Muslim family in 1947. The British writer Roald Dahl called Mr. Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist.” The British novelist John Berger suggested Mr. Rushdie withdraw the novel, lest it unleash “a unique 20th-century holy war” that would endanger bystanders who were “innocent of either writing or reading the book.” As the fatwa (which was never officially rescinded) seemed to fade in significance, the conversation over free speech shifted, particularly in the United States. The notion that offensive speech is “violence” gained ground, as younger progressives increasingly critiqued the principle of free speech as too often providing cover for hate speech. “Free speech” became a rallying cry of conservatives, who used it as a weapon against liberals they accuse of wanting to censor opposing views. Tensions over free speech were thrown into high relief in 2015, when the writers group PEN America decided to present an award for courage to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had continued publishing after French Muslim terrorists murdered 12 staff members in an attack on its offices. Six writers withdrew as hosts of PEN’s annual gala over concerns about the award, on the grounds that the magazine had trafficked in racism and Islamophobia. More than 140 prominent writers subsequently signed a letter protesting the honor. Mr. Rushdie’s reaction to the protest was blunt. “I hope nobody ever comes after them,” he told The New York Times. (On Twitter, he called the six writers who withdrew, some of whom were good friends, an obscene name and labeled them “Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”)
In an email, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the organizers of the Harper’s letter, said he had been impressed by the response from many writers, if struck by the “comparatively muted response” from “many of the voices who have dominated conversations around justice and oppression since the summer of 2020.” He wrote on Twitter after the attack on Friday: “Words are not violence. Violence is violence. That distinction must never be downplayed or forgotten, even on behalf of a group we deem oppressed.”
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