[BITList] Fwd: [From: Mike Feltham] How one book ignited a culture war - SELF CENSORSHIP !
Michael Feltham
mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Sun Jan 11 15:56:04 GMT 2009
Begin forwarded message:
From: "guardian.co.uk" <noreply at guardian.co.uk>
Date: 11 January 2009 15:52:34 GMT
To: mj.feltham at madasafish.com
Subject: [From: Mike Feltham] How one book ignited a culture war
Mike Feltham spotted this on the guardian.co.uk site and thought you
should see it.
To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site,
go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses
How one book ignited a culture war
It's 20 years since Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini
pronounced a death sentence on Salman Rushdie for 'insulting' Islam
with his novel The Satanic Verses. The repercussions were profound -
and are still being felt. Andrew Anthony traces the course of the
affair, from book-burnings and firebombings to the dramatic impact it
had on freedom of expression in a multicultural society
Andrew Anthony
Sunday January 11 2009
The Observer
The phrase "literary London" is usually employed to nebulous effect
but it accurately describes the gathering that took place at the Greek
Orthodox church in Bayswater on 14 February, a clear blue St
Valentine's Day, in 1989. The occasion was Bruce Chatwin's memorial
service, and it was attended by a large contingent of what was and
remains an exceptional generation of British or British-based writers.
Among them were Martin Amis, Paul Theroux and Salman Rushdie.
According to Theroux, Chatwin's funeral "was the high watermark of
that decade's creative activity". For Amis, Chatwin, a recent convert
to Greek Orthodoxy, had played a last joke on his friends by
subjecting them to "a religion that no one he knew could understand or
respond to". If so, it was a joke destined to be overshadowed by a
very different kind of theological offering that was far more of a
challenge to understand or respond to. That same morning Rushdie had
been informed of the fatwa issued by the Iranian leader, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, calling for his execution for the crime of writing
a novel, The Satanic Verses.
Word of the death sentence had spread among the mourners. Thinking the
fatwa was little more than the empty threat of a faraway tyrant,
Theroux called out to Rushdie: "Next week we'll be back here for you!"
But Khomeini's pronouncements in such matters were seldom without
consequence. As far back as 1947, when merely a cleric, he had ordered
the death of an Iranian education minister who within days was shot
dead. And thereafter countless other political and intellectual
opponents were to lose their lives on Khomeini's command. Chatwin's
memorial service was to be Rushdie's last public appearance for some
time.
He spent the remainder of that day searching for his son, Zafar, then
he went into hiding. The headline of the London evening paper read:
EXECUTE RUSHDIE, ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH. "Salman had disappeared into
the world of block caps," wrote Amis. "He had vanished into the front
page." In fact he had moved with a Special Branch protection team to
the Lygon Arms hotel in the Cotswolds. Apparently a tabloid reporter
happened to be in the next room, conducting an adulterous affair, and
missed the biggest story of the year. That same evening Channel 4
broadcast a pre-recorded interview with Rushdie on The Bandung File.
"It's very simple in this country," said the author, when asked about
the demands that his book be withdrawn from shops. "If you don't want
to read a book, you don't have to read it. It's very hard to be
offended by The Satanic Verses - it requires a long period of intense
reading. It's a quarter of a million words."
Four days after Rushdie received his "unfunny Valentine", he issued an
apology: "I profoundly regret the distress that publication has
occasioned to sincere followers of Islam." At first the apology was
rejected then accepted in Iran, before Khomeini stated that even if
Rushdie repented and "became the most pious man of all time" it was
still incumbent on every Muslim to "employ everything he has got" to
kill him. So much for the spirit of forgiveness.
What the mixed responses pointed to was that, right from the start,
The Satanic Verses affair was less a theological dispute than an
opportunity to exert political leverage. The background to the
controversy was the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran to be the
standard bearer of global Islam. The Saudis had spent a great deal of
money exporting the fundamentalist or Salafi version of Sunni Islam,
while Shiite Iran, still smarting from a calamitous war and
humiliating armistice with Iraq, was keen to reassert its credentials
as the vanguard of the Islamic revolution. Both the Saudis and
Iranians saw a new constituency, ripe for exploitation, in the small
British protest groups that initially responded to The Satanic Verses
with book-burning demonstrations. But in fact the protesters who took
to the streets in Bradford and other mill towns were themselves the
offspring of other far-off theocratic politics in the subcontinent.
The Satanic Verses was published on 26 September 1988 and, after
pressure from the Janata party, banned in India by Rajiv Gandhi's
government nine days later. Flushed with this success, Indians working
for the Saudi-financed Islamic Foundation of Leicester suggested
trying to get the book banned in Britain. According to Malise
Ruthven, author of A Satanic Affair, the campaign was then
orchestrated by Jamaat-i-Islami, the party founded in Pakistan by
Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi. A journalist-cum-theologian, Maududi
preached that "for the entire human race, there is only one way of
life which is Right in the eyes of God and that is al-Islam".
Nevertheless it was the Saudis who funded the United Kingdom Action
Committee on Islamic Affairs, the protest body set up to maximise
pressure on The Satanic Verses. It featured Islamists like Iqbal
Sacranie, the future head of the Muslim Council of Britain. (Sacranie
famously opined that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy" for Rushdie.
He was later knighted for services to community relations.) And it was
the Saudi clerics who were planning a trial of Rushdie in absentia.
In keeping with most Muslim countries, Iran did not ban The Satanic
Verses. It was even reviewed in an Iranian newspaper. But noticing the
protests in India and Britain, a delegation of mullahs from the holy
city of Qum read a section of the book to Khomeini, including the part
featuring a mad imam in exile, which was an obvious caricature of
Khomeini. As one British diplomat in Iran said: "It was designed to
send the old boy incandescent." So it was that the Iranians delivered
the fatwa, thus winning the competition to be the greatest haters of
Rushdie, and therefore the West, and all that entailed.
As Khomeini put it in a speech nine days after the fatwa, The Satanic
Verses was very important to what he called the "world devourers"
because they had mobilised the "entire Zionism and arrogance behind
it". The book, he went on, was a "calculated" attack by "colonialism"
on the greatness and honour of the clergy. It's worth noting here that
the book, written by an arch anti-colonialist, was indeed in part an
attack, or at least satire, on the role of the clergy, the caste of
priests that has no Qur'anic authority. In this newspaper, just before
the fatwa, Rushdie had written: "A powerful tribe of clerics has taken
over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police."
The next decade was a dangerous and isolating time for Rushdie. He was
shadowed round-the-clock by bodyguards, and moved each time the
security services became aware of one of the series of plots to kill
him. Because there were British hostages held by Islamic extremists in
Lebanon, Rushdie was advised by the authorities not to say or do
anything that might antagonise their captors. Politicians remained at
a safe public distance from him. Travel, once the driver of his
imagination, had become a logistical and administrative nightmare. The
subcontinent was ruled out. British Airways told him not to fly with
them because it might endanger their staff. And when he did manage to
go abroad, staying with friends was a cramped affair. As Christopher
Hitchens, an old friend and staunch advocate, recently recalled of a
Rushdie visit to Washington DC: "When he was staying at my house back
at Thanksgiving of 1993, so were about a dozen heavily armed members
of the United States's finest anti-terrorist forces." In contemplating
these sorts of details, it's hard to keep in mind that the person at
the centre of them was just a writer. "I said somewhere," he told me
last year, "that it was like a bad Salman Rushdie novel."
The years following the fatwa were also a damaging and sometimes
lethal period for many of those associated with The Satanic Verses,
few of whom had any protection. In April 1989 Collets, the left-wing
bookshop, and Dillons were firebombed for stocking the Rushdie novel.
A month later there were explosions in High Wycombe and London's
King's Road. There was a bomb in the Liberty department store which
housed a Penguin Bookshop (Penguin was the publisher of The Satanic
Verses) and at the York Penguin bookshop. Unexploded devices were also
discovered at the Nottingham, Guildford and Peterborough branches of
the store.
In August the same year Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh accidentally blew
himself up in a Paddington hotel room while priming a bomb intended to
kill Rushdie. Meanwhile Rushdie's marriage to the American author
Marianne Wiggins did not long survive the pressures of life in hiding.
Rushdie was at a low ebb and writing very little. Amis wrote: "I often
tell him that if the Rushdie Affair were, for instance, the Amis
Affair, then I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquillised 300-
pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs, and covered in blotches
and burns from various misadventures with the syringe and the
crackpipe."
Rushdie sought another way out. On Christmas Eve 1990 he issued a
statement bearing witness that "there is no God but Allah, and
Muhammad is his last prophet". Claiming to have renewed his faith in
Islam, he said he did not agree with any character in The Satanic
Verses who "casts aspersions... upon the authenticity of the holy
Qur'an, or who rejects the divinity of Allah". He also said he would
not release a paperback of the book. That evening he was so disgusted
with himself that he was physically sick. The playwright Arnold
Wesker, a Rushdie supporter, said: "The religious terrorists have
won." Hitchens recalls: "I told Salman that it didn't make any
difference to my support for him but that I didn't think it would
'work' and that I didn't think it was dignified. I think he felt much
better after he re-apostasised: it was a sort of Gethsemane - if you
will forgive the expression - after which he was determined to see the
whole thing through." Years later Rushdie would publicly say it was
the biggest mistake of his life, a "deranged" moment when he had hit
rock bottom. In the event, it made no difference. Though Khomeini was
now dead, the Iranian clergy confirmed that Rushdie still had to be
killed. The following year Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese
translator, was stabbed to death and Ettore Capriolo, the Italian
translator, seriously injured in another knife attack. In 1993 William
Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot and injured, and Aziz
Nesin, the Turkish translator, was the target of the Silvas massacre
in Turkey that left 37 dead in an arson attack on a hotel.
For years the novel was withdrawn from display in shops around the
world but it still became a bestseller in several countries, including
America, and was published, despite all the demands and threats, in
paperback. Moreover, Rushdie has gone on to enjoy a successful career,
writing seven more novels and several other books, and he has also
attained a measure of normalised liberty since the Iranian government
effectively withdrew its backing from the fatwa in 1998. To this
extent, Khomeini's edict and the murderous campaign it engendered
failed abysmally. But Rushdie and The Satanic Verses, it should be
remembered, was not the only target of the fatwa. In his original
statement, broadcast on Iranian radio, Khomeini not only called for
the death of all those consciously associated with the book but also
said they should be executed "so that no one will dare to insult the
Islamic sanctity". In this respect, and several others, Khomeini's
terror has proved far more effective.
Who would dare to write a book like The Satanic Verses nowadays? And
if some brave or reckless author did dare, who would publish it? The
signs in both cases are that no such writer or publisher is likely to
appear, and for two reasons. The first and most obvious is fear. The
Satanic Verses is a rich and complex literary novel, by turns ironic,
fantastical and satirical. Despite what is often said, mostly by those
who haven't read it, the book does not take direct aim at Islam or its
prophet. Those sections that have caused the greatest controversy are
contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the
grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered
subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction - a
work of magical realism fiction! - there is no escape from literalist
tyranny. Any sentence might turn out to be a death sentence. And few
if any of even the boldest and most iconoclastic artists wish to run
that risk.
The recent case of The Jewel of Medina, a work by Sherry Jones which
is neither bold nor iconoclastic, exemplifies the problem. In 2007 the
American publishers Random House bought the rights to this historical
novel about the prophet Muhammad's wife Aisha. By all accounts the
book is something of a cheesy romance. Jones herself believes it is a
circumspect fiction which "portrays the prophet Muhammad as a gentle,
compassionate, wise leader and man respectful toward women and his
wives". But a professor of Middle Eastern studies named Denise
Spellberg advised Random House that it might provoke violence. The
publishers duly cancelled the publication.
"We stand firmly by our responsibility to support our authors and the
free discussion of ideas, even those that may be construed as
offensive by some," Random House explained in a statement. "However, a
publisher must weigh that responsibility against others that it also
bears, and in this instance we decided, after much deliberation, to
postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random
House, booksellers and anyone who would be involved in distribution
and sale of the novel."
This has become a familiar conceit in recent years: we defend the
right of freedom of expression but prefer not to exercise it in
situations that might endanger us. Random House publish Rushdie, and
he was angered by what he saw as a capitulation to the threat of
Islamic reprisals. "This is censorship by fear, and it sets a very bad
precedent indeed," he said.
In Britain the book was taken up by the independent publisher, Gibson
Square. But on 27 September last year the London home of Martin Rynja,
Gibson Square's publisher, was firebombed. As things stand, the book's
British publication is indefinitely postponed.
Nor is this self-censorship restricted to literature. Ramin Gray,
associate director of the Royal Court Theatre, recently admitted that
he would be reluctant to stage a play that was critical of Islam. "You
would think twice," he said. "You'd have to take the play on its
merits but given the time we're in, it's very hard because you'd worry
that if you cause offence then the whole enterprise would become
buried in a sea of controversy. It does make you tread carefully."
The Royal Court cancelled a new version of Aristophanes's Lysistrata
last year because the play is set in Muslim paradise. The Barbican cut
out sections of Tamburlaine the Great for similar reasons, and in 2006
Berlin's Deutsche Oper dropped a production of Mozart's Idomeneo
because it depicted Muhammad. In 2005 Tate Britain removed God is
Great, John Latham's sculpture featuring copies of a Bible, a Qur'an
and a Talmud, because, according to a gallery statement, it was not
"appropriate" in the sensitive post-7/7 climate. As Kenan Malik,
author of the forthcoming book From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair
and Its Legacy, has written: "The fatwa has in effect become
internalised".
Fear is not the only explanation why a global religion which, rightly
or wrongly, is invoked as the inspiration for terror has become a non-
subject for critical (or uncritical) works of art. The other reason is
sympathy. And here Khomeini has proved prescient. Back in 1989, only
the most conspiracy-minded Islamists took seriously Khomeini's claims
that The Satanic Verses was part of a Zionist-imperialist plot to
persecute Muslims.
The world has since changed. Following the events of 11 September
2001, the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and the
ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the idea that
the West is engaged in a military and cultural war with Islam is now
far more widely entertained. A conflation has taken place in which the
war in Iraq and the plight of the Palestinians has become somehow
indivisible from the situation of Muslims in Britain. So that to be
opposed to the war is to be, if not actively in favour of Islamism at
home (the position of much of the far left), then at least not against
it. And by extension, open criticism of Islamism, religious censorship
and violence is often automatically viewed as an expression of
"neocon" or "imperialist" politics.
Although there were exceptions at the time - among them Germaine
Greer, John Berger and John Le Carré - many prominent cultural
figures on the left extended Rushdie their support both here and
abroad. Even a critic of The Satanic Verses, the Egyptian novelist and
Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who felt the book was insulting to
Islam, signed a petition stating that "no blasphemy harms Islam and
Muslims so much as the call for murdering a writer". Five years later
Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by Islamic extremists.
In the years since the fatwa there have been many more flashpoints in
which artists and writers have been threatened, attacked or killed for
criticising Islam, and not all have been Muslims. Hitchens thinks this
is a development that has been overlooked. "Salman was raised as a
Muslim," he says, "so in theory he's within the jurisdiction. He can
be sentenced as an apostate, and the same can be done to Ayaan Hirsi
Ali and Taslima Nasreen [the Bangladeshi novelist under threat of
decapitation who has just been offered refuge in Paris]. But what
people haven't noticed sufficiently is that now people who are not
Muslims, like the Danish cartoonists, have been threatened with
violence for criticising Islam. That's sort of new, and ought to be
more controversial than it is."
Yet few of those who have found themselves targeted by Islamic
extremists in the wake of the Rushdie fatwa received wholehearted
support from the liberal community. Quite the opposite. Theo Van Gogh,
slaughtered on a busy street in Amsterdam; his co-filmmaker Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, threatened with death and placed under police protection;
the Danish cartoonists who responded to Jyllands-Posten's commission
to draw the prophet Muhammad and were forced into hiding: in each of
these high-profile cases, the victims of intimidation were castigated
and shunned by a wide swathe of progressive opinion.
"Right wing", "provocateurs", "reactionaries" and "racist" are some of
the more restrained epithets aimed at the above names by their liberal
critics. (Incidentally, surely the defining example of the absurdity
of self-censorship is that the Danish cartoon that did not feature an
image of the prophet but instead the legend "Jyllands-Posten's
journalists are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs" was also deemed
too dangerous to publish by every newspaper in Britain.)
The word, though, that is most frequently launched at the heirs of
Rushdie is Islamophobic. Almost any criticism of Islam or any of its
adherents is likely to trigger accusations of Islamophobia. For
example, in 2007 the Channel 4 documentary Undercover Mosque exposed
various preachers making hateful and violent statements regarding
women, Jews, homosexuals and infidels. By any journalistic measure it
was a compelling and revelatory documentary. But in the media storm
that followed it was not the inflammatory preachers but the programme-
makers who found themselves subject to an inquisition. The police
tried to prosecute them for broadcasting "material likely to stir up
racial hatred". And when that failed they referred the film to Ofcom
for censure. It took nine months before the film-makers were fully
vindicated and their professional reputations restored.
Of course, very few people sympathised with the preachers shown in the
documentary but many did want to express their sympathy with Muslims
in general, whom they saw, not without reason, as an embattled
minority. And to the well-intentioned, the best way of doing this was
to condemn anyone who criticised any Muslim, regardless of their
extremism. As the playwright David Edgar put it: "Whether they like it
or not, the current defectors [his term for those liberals who
criticise extremist Islamic leaders] are seeking to provide a
vocabulary for the progressive intelligentsia to abandon the poor."
Muslims in all their myriad variety and differences have morphed, or
been corralled, into a unitary socio-economic-cultural block. To take
vocal exception to one aspect of Islam or one particular leader or
sect is, almost by definition, to be an opponent of all Muslims. The
Satanic Verses affair was the first test case in Britain of Muslimhood
- many were to follow - in which the mark of a true Muslim was to be
in favour of banning the novel, and the distinction of an even truer
Muslim was to be in favour of killing Rushdie. Inayat Bunglawala,
spokesperson for the Jamaat-i-Islami-influenced Muslim Council of
Britain, probably the most-often cited Islamic organisation in the
country, passed both tests with flying colours. He was, in his own
words, "elated" when Khomeini delivered the fatwa. "It was a very
welcome reminder that British Muslims did not have to regard
themselves just as a small, vulnerable minority; they were part of a
truly global and powerful movement." Nowadays he accepts that book-
banning is wrong, though he looks back with gratitude on the protests.
"It was a seminal moment in British Muslim history," he told me. "It
brought Muslims together. Before that they had been identified as
ethnic communities but The Satanic Verses brought them together and
helped develop a British Muslim identity, which I'm sure infuriates
Salman Rushdie."
One reason for Rushdie's fury could be that an identity forged on
terrorising a fiction writer, with its direct associations of violence
and censorship, is not a fair one to hang on two million Britons.
Kenan Malik suggests that it is a myth that "all Muslims were offended
by The Satanic Verses. In fact, most Muslims were little concerned
about it." But as with most political arguments, in this particular
identity parade apathy never got a look in. Instead the most outspoken
"community leaders" claimed, and were duly assigned, the mantle of
authentic representatives of Muslim Britain.
Yet again Khomeini was onto something. The expressed intention of his
fatwa was to defend and strengthen the clergy, and one of its effects
in Britain has been to create a kind of pseudo-clergy, a class of
Islamist intellectuals and militants who presume to speak not just for
their co-religionists in Britain but 1.5 billion Muslims worldwide. At
the same time, in the late 80s and early 90s, another clergy of
fundamentalist preachers, often refugees from despotic Middle Eastern
regimes, began to attract a disaffected constituency that had been
radicalised by The Satanic Verses protests. As Hirsi Ali put it to me:
"The paradox in the UK with regard to freedom of expression is that
most of the radical literature and most of the radical mosques moved
from Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and established themselves in the
liberal West, where there is freedom of religion and expression, with
the bizarre purpose of destroying those freedoms."
In the 20 years since the fatwa, the parameters of cultural debate in
Britain and elsewhere have undoubtedly narrowed. If the Islam of
Khomeini and other fundamentalists has played a key role in redefining
what is and is not acceptable, then it is not the only factor. Other
religions have also got in on the censorship act. In 2004 the play
Behzti (Dishonour) was cancelled at the Birmingham Rep after a riot by
Sikh protesters on the opening night. Christian groups too have taken
to organising more intimidating protests - though with less success -
against shows and productions they deem offensive.
Taken together they are all part of a multicultural accommodation that
has come to determine the terms of public discourse. In hindsight, The
Satanic Verses was published at a turning point in progressive
politics. Throughout much of the 20th century a battle had been waged
against discriminating on the basis of race (The Satanic Verses itself
was avowedly anti-racist) and class. In other words, those aspects of
humanity that are biologically inherited or socially imposed. For a
variety of reasons, including the fall of the Berlin Wall later on in
1989 and the emergence of minority group activism, a new identity
politics emerged. Class and race were replaced or trumped by culture.
The emphasis moved to combating cultural discrimination. All cultures
were deemed equal, and therefore all components of culture - religion,
tradition, beliefs - had to be protected from critical appraisal.
Obviously culture is socially inherited, but in a free society it is
also a matter of freedom of choice. The liberty to change your
beliefs, reject your traditions and question your religion is what
distinguishes individuals from members of an enforced collective. Such
liberty necessitates the discussion and expression of ideas that may
be unpalatable to others. Increasingly, therefore, this has become a
process that is actively discouraged.
Respecting culture has come to mean restricting debate. Malik quotes
the sociologist Tariq Modood on this issue: "If people are to occupy
the same political space without conflict, they mutually have to limit
the extent to which they subject each other's fundamental beliefs to
criticism."
To some extent this sensitivity has been achieved by coercion - the
fatwa model. But there has also been a more voluntary adoption of
multicultural manners, chief among which is the duty not to offend.
And where that has failed, the government has shown itself all too
willing to step in with proscriptive legislation. Three years ago we
came within a single parliamentary vote of being saddled with a law
(the Religious Hatred Act) that meant you or I could be imprisoned for
seven years for using insulting language, even if the insult was
unintentional and referred to an established truth.
Furthermore, under draconian anti-terror laws, it is now illegal to be
in possession of a whole range of reading material. This is one of the
terrible ironies of the conflict with reactionary Islam, previewed in
the attempt to censor (and kill) Rushdie. In 1989 the British
government defended freedom of expression against Islamic extremists.
By 2009 Islamic extremists could accuse the British government of
withdrawing freedom of expression. That the extremists dream of a far
more extensive (and violent) censorship is no comfort or excuse.
Rushdie has now moved on, figuratively and geographically, from the
fatwa years. Back from the front pages, he has once again relocated,
having lived in Mumbai and London, to New York (he is not alone in
noting that all three cities have suffered Islamic terror attacks).
But The Satanic Verses remains a book about the struggles of
migration and the frictions of cultural exchange. It pokes fun at all
manner of targets, not least America and Britain. Above all, perhaps,
it dramatises the conviction that there is nothing more sacred than
the freedom to question what is sacred. Twenty years on, it's a
principle that urgently needs to be remembered.What they said at the
time
Harold Pinter playwright
"A very distinguished writer has used his imagination to write a book
and has criticised the religion into which he was born and he has been
sentenced to death as well as his publishers. It is an intolerable and
barbaric state of affairs."
John Berger author and critic
"I suspect that Salman Rushdie, if he is not caught in a chain of
events of which he has completely lost control, might, by now, be
ready to consider asking his world publishers to stop producing more
or new editions of The Satanic Verses. Not because of the threat to
his own life, but because of the threat to the lives of those who are
innocent of either writing or reading the book."
Germaine Greer writer and academic
"I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his
own troubles."
Jimmy Carter US president, 1977-81
"Rushdie's book is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose
sacred beliefs have been violated ... The death sentence proclaimed by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, however, was an abhorrent response. It is
our duty to condemn the threat of murder [but] we should be sensitive
to the concern and anger that prevails even among the more moderate
Muslims."
John Le Carre author
"Again and again, it has been within his [Rushdie's] power to save the
faces of his publishers and, with dignity, withdraw his book until a
calmer time has come ... It seems to me he has nothing more to prove
except his own insensitivity."
Roald Dahl author
"[Rushdie] knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead
otherwise.This kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent
book on to the top of the bestseller list - but to my mind it is a
cheap way of doing it.
Sir Geoffrey Howe foreign secretary, 1983-89
The British government, the British people, do not have any affection
for the book ... It compares Britain with Hitler's Germany. We do not
like that any more than the people of the Muslim faith like the
attacks on their faith contained in the book. So we are not sponsoring
the book. What we are sponsoring is the right of people to speak
freely, to publish freely."
Twenty years on: how the fatwa on Salman Rushdie has gagged our society
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