Last night’s Twitter feed was dispiriting. A surprising number of tweeters from the Middle East came out of the woodwork to pray for the death of Salman Rushdie, who was attacked yesterday. Even many Americans didn’t seem to understand that “free speech” protects speech that you don’t like or find offensive. That’s the point. Other speech doesn’t need protection.
Douglas Murray posted “The Best Response to Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing” over at The Spectator. You can read the whole thing here. An excerpt:
In his 2012 memoir – Joseph Anton – Rushdie wrote about the fatwa years. The book is a detailed chronicle of all the people who let him down: the MPs who promised support and then whipped up mobs; the political figures of left and right who said that while the Ayatollah may have caused an offence so had the novelist; the authorities who allowed Muslims in Bradford and others on television to call for a British subject´s murder with impunity.
But it is also a chronicle of the people who supported him, the friends who stood by him and the public figures who stood up for him. One of them was the American writer Susan Sontag, who helped organise a public reading of Rushdie´s work in New York. As Sontag said, the moment called for some basic ‘civic courage’. It is striking how much of that civic courage has evaporated in recent years. Today no one would be able to write – much less get published – a novel like The Satanic Verses. Perhaps nobody has tried. From novels to cartoons a de facto Islamic blasphemy law settled across the West in the wake of the Rushdie affair. The attack today will doubtless exacerbate that.
So apart from willing, wishing or praying for Rushdie´s recovery, the only other thing that can be done now is to display that civic courage that Sontag called for three decades ago. The Satanic Verses is a complex but brilliant novel. It includes an hilarious and devastating reimagining of the origins of the Quran. I hope that people will read it, and read from it, more than ever. Because what happened in New York today cannot be allowed to win. The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature. The enemies of free expression cannot be allowed to quash it. The attacker should get exactly the opposite of the response he will have hoped for. Not just hopefully a failure to silence Rushdie, but a failure to limit what the rest of us are allowed to think, read, hear and say.
Read the whole thing here.
Update on August 13, from Google: “The Satanic Verses reached No. 1 in contemporary fiction on Amazon’s best-sellers list on Saturday, in the wake of the stabbing attack on the author the day before.“
Tags: Douglas Murray, Salman Rushdie
August 13th, 2022 at 8:44 pm
My significant other is a big Rushdie fan. She buys and reads every new novel he publishes, she maintains a full shelf of his novels, and she recently included selections from “The Satanic Verses” in a magical realism class for high school kids. I pulled the book off the shelf and started reading it tonight. It’s good; I wish I’d read it sooner.
August 13th, 2022 at 8:54 pm
So good to hear from you, Jeff! As for Rushdie … I’m lining up behind you.