I was still a teenager when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989, after the publication of his novel satanic verses. I didn’t know anything about either of them, and I didn’t even know what a fatwa was. But I remember finding it deeply backward that you want to kill a writer for a book.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
Killing for a fiction, it will never enter my head. But today you can have your head cut off for just trying to explain that in a class, as happened in France to Professor Samuel Paty.
The Rushdie affair had not marked me so much at the time, because the atmosphere was different. The same year, the Berlin Wall fell, and democracy would spread all over the planet – at least, that’s what many naive people believed, me included. Well, cursed writers didn’t really exist anymore, except in our slightly romantic fantasies.
How could we foresee the attacks of September 11, 2001 and, 20 years later, the American rout in Afghanistan, where are the Taliban and the burqas back?
Over time, we had come to hope that Khomeini’s fatwa had somewhat fallen into oblivion. Thirty-three years later, it took a fanatic, returning from a trip to Lebanon, to take this distant call to murder literally and attack the writer during a conference in Chautauqua, in the New York State. Fortunately, Salman Rushdie survived, but he could live with the permanent scars of this assassination attempt. All that for a novel published in 1988 that most of his enemies have never read.
Salman Rushdie has courageously defied threats for decades by refusing to be silent, pursuing his work crowned with the most prestigious prizes – because he is certainly not only the author of satanic verses – and his commitment to freedom of expression.
It is difficult not to make links with the attack on Charlie Hebdowhich claimed 12 lives in 2015. The French satirical newspaper became a target of Islamists when it published the Danish newspaper’s Muhammad cartoons in 2006 Jyllands-Posten.
We say to ourselves that, the terrorists having succeeded in decimating the newsroom, there was no longer a target, but the same year the attacks of November 13 occurred, even more deadly, as if it was necessary to punish this society that had said “I am Charlie”.
But not everyone was Charlie; some even found that the cartoonists had searched for their deaths. Among them, intellectuals who seemed to be sawing without realizing it the branch on which they are sitting.
In 2015, the American PEN Club, whose mission is to defend freedom of the press and freedom of expression, chose to present the “Courage and Freedom of Expression” prize to Charlie Hebdo. It was not unanimous as a petition was signed by more than 200 writers – including Michael Ondaatje, Joyce Carol Oates and Russell Banks – who spoke out against the award to Charlie Hebdo, handed over under close surveillance in New York. They considered that this distinction should be an example and that one rewarded a newspaper having versed in the provocation and offended communities.
The tradition of the French-style satirical newspaper is not understood by everyone, Charlie Hebdo existing to offend just about anything in sight, without discrimination. The proof being his front page of this week, where we see a disfigured drawing of Salman Rushdie, with this title: “Salman Rushdie is better: he is finally walking incognito! “. There is also a text titled: “Rushdie 1989-2022: he still profited from it”.
It would be surprising if Salman Rushdie were offended by this cover, because if there is one who has come to the defense of Charlie Hebdo after the attacks, it was he who sharply criticized the instigators of the petition opposed to the awarding of the prize by the PEN Club. “They are horribly wrong,” he said. What I would say to them is that I hope no one ever comes after them. »
You could say he knew what he was talking about.
Rushdie also wrote: “It is very good that the PEN Club honors the sacrifice of Charlie Hebdo and convicts murderers without those disgusting “yes, buts.” This issue has nothing to do with oppressed or disadvantaged minorities. It has everything to do with fighting fanatical Islam, which is highly organized, well funded, and seeks to terrorize us all, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, and plunge us into fearful silence.”
Charlie Hebdounder the pen of Riss, paid tribute to Salman Rushdie after his attack: “We heard the same evening commentators explaining that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was all the more revolting than what he had written in his book, satanic verses, was absolutely not disrespectful of Islam. Reasoning of a very great perversity, because it induces that conversely, disrespectful remarks towards Islam would justify a fatwa and a punishment, even mortal. Well no, we will have to repeat again and again that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence, of anyone for anything. »
Writer Margaret Atwood wrote this week in The Guardian “If we don’t defend freedom of speech, we live in tyranny: Salman Rushdie showed us that. »
In our democratic societies, freedom of expression should be taken for granted, but Margaret Atwood acknowledges that it has become a hot topic “since the extreme right tries to kidnap her to use her for slander, lies and hatred, and that the far left is trying to throw it out the window in favor of its version of earthly perfection. »
We don’t really know how our era has fallen into this fury of banning, which does no good. From those who want to remove books because they contain an offensive word or because they address gender and race theories, to fundamentalists who kill authors, the constellation of censors has grown bizarrely wider, as if literature had never been so dangerous as in the 21ste century.
Now, writers cursed by fanatics are like a pebble in the comfortable slipper of our indifference; their enemies always end up reminding us to what extent they embody an essential freedom, which we must defend at all costs. In any case, Salman Rushdie paid a high price, and for that we will always be indebted to him.