In Joseph Anton, an autobiography (2012), Salman Rushdie writes that literature serves “to augment the sum of what human beings are capable of perceiving, understanding, and therefore ultimately being”. Monday, in The Guardian, in a more political order of ideas, the writer Margaret Atwood echoes these words, emphasizing that by failing in our societies to respect the multiplicity of voices, there was indeed a risk that we would end up “by living under a tyranny”.
Tyranny, the word is not too strong. That of small and large obscurantisms. A large number of voices have been raised since Friday, such as that of the author of The Scarlet Maidto denounce the obscurantism and ignorance that motivated the knife attack on Salman Rushdie and to come to the defense of the freedom of expression that the writer, who has never stopped writing, n He continued to cultivate “absolutely” despite the fatwa decreed against him by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989 for “blasphemy against Islam”.
Still, of these voices, there are not enough. That there is never enough. Word to the team of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, who writes simply: “The assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie reminds those who seemed to forget that the fundamental freedoms of a modern society, such as the freedom to create and express oneself, are constantly threatened through the world by totalitarian ideologies. »
Attacks at the Bataclan and against Charlie Hebdo in 2015 to the frightening murder by beheading in 2020 of French professor Samuel Paty, for having dared to want to discuss in a course on freedom of expression two cartoons of Muhammad published by the satirical newspaper, the tendency is indeed to forget too quickly. The tendency is to think that our democratic freedoms, to cast a wide net, are a garden whose flowers may be torn off by bad winds, but whose soil is far too fertile for these freedoms not to continue to bloom naturally.
That the attack that Salman Rushdie suffered comes, within three days, at the same time as the first anniversary of the return to power of the undrinkable Taliban in Afghanistan is a telling coincidence. How telling is that Mr Rushdie, who appears to be happily recovering from his serious injuries, was stabbed in a quiet American town like Chautauqua, where he was apparently going to speak about the land of exile that was the United States for writers. The overmilitarization of US international policy is, after all, a reflection of the armed violence that infects American society from within. “Democracy has never been so threatened,” writes Atwood in The Guardian, and the attempted assassination of a writer is just one more symptom. »
It’s not necessarily very far, after all, from the religious fanatics who have wanted Mr. Rushdie dead for 30 years to the blind faith of Republican activists in Donald Trump.
In the name of the defense of Islam, Ayatollah Khomeini transformed some passages of satanic verses, a 600-page novel that he has not read — or, if not, whose intelligence he has not grasped — as a death sentence and a major political cause. Tragically, this manipulation still holds water.
While claiming, which is likely, to have nothing to do with the aggression committed by Hadi Matar, this young American of Lebanese origin of 24 years, Tehran blessed the crime and the ultra-conservative Iranian press celebrated it. Tragic is the fact that relations with the Arab-Muslim world have evolved so little and so badly. Although it would be simplistic to reduce Muslim public opinion, starting with the opinion of Iranians, to the tyrants who claim to speak in their name.
No less deplorable, in the wake of this attack, is India’s silence. The writer’s native country was the first, in 1988, to ban Verses for “offending religious feelings”. A ban still officially in force, which the government of Rajiv Gandhi had imposed with the intention of capturing electorally the conservative Indo-Muslim voices. The current National-Hinduist government of Narendra Modi has taken a lasting dislike to Salman Rushdie after he spoke out against the “rise of intolerance” in the country. We could, with others, have titled this editorial I am Salman. A free thinker and convinced layman, Rushdie will have learned to think freely — since, precisely, to think freely can be learned and requires courage. Caught up by the fatwa – what terrible consequences this episode will leave him – he has not been disarmed for 33 years in his defense of freedom of speech.
There is in the force of his complex thought, far from simplifications, an example to follow at all costs.