The idea that a writer can lose his freedom simply because his writings displease is absurd in itself. Admitting that the latter can give up gestures as elementary as walking freely in the street, taking public transport or walking their children in a park is just as important.
Resigning oneself to the fact of having to deploy a security cordon around one’s person to allow him to participate in a literary encounter sends shivers down the spine. Knowing that he is risking his life for his ideas is certainly, for this awakener of consciences, the most terrifying thing that he will face (and his readers too) during his life each time he undertakes this banal gesture of dragging his fingers on the keyboard.
In the intimacy of himself, when he thinks furtively of the beings he loves above all else, will the act of writing seem to him derisory or, on the contrary, consubstantial with his condition? How will he approach this burning and insatiable desire to make his voice emerge alongside other voices?
But if the pen provokes the disastrous consequences that we know from it, why then think of writing? Why impose such an effort knowing that it could end badly? Why persist in descending with a diving suit into the depths of humanity in order to bring the beautiful and the ugly, the essential and the superfluous, to the surface? Of what is this impossibility to accept the freedom of a writer the symptom? And then, forgive me for daring this terrible question: do we really have to resolve to count a few inevitable deaths?
Algerian chaos
The first time these questions crossed my mind was in 1989, when there was a bounty on the head of Salman Rushdie. Since then, I’ve thought about it ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times. I was still living in Algeria, where, as a young teenager, I was trying to make my way through the chaos that threatened my country.
Indeed, that year, in Algiers, on February 18, at the Sunna mosque, the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) formalized its creation with a fierce appetite for death. Moreover, these leaders howled in their sermons that those who fought them with the pen would perish by the sword. […]
Being disavowed for “insulting Islam” was part of the order of things. It was enough to call a writer an apostate, an infidel, a Jew, a Westerner, to strip him of his humanity. And to execute him, in the middle of the street or in his sleep. Thousands of Algerians fell under the blows of false devotees. We were walking over corpses.
It was enough to widen the focal length to grasp the magnitude of the earthquake that shook part of the world at the very beginning of the 1990s. In Turkey, a famous critic of Islam, Turan Dursun, aged 56, was assassinated on September 4 1990 in front of his house in Istanbul. His writings and his library were destroyed. Farag Foda, writer, lawyer and secular activist, was riddled with bullets in the suburbs of Cairo on June 8, 1992, in front of his 15-year-old son. Iranian poet and entertainer Freydoun Farrokhzad was stabbed to death in Germany on August 8, 1992.
Sadiq Melallah, poet, was accused of “blasphemy and abjuration”, then beheaded with a saber by the Saudi absolutist regime, on September 3, 1992, in the main square of the city of Qatif. On July 2, 1993, 37 intellectuals perished in Sivas, Turkey, in a fire that targeted the Turkish translator of satanic verses. At that time, in Algeria, every day we held our breath.
I measured with horror the fragility of life and the fruitful force of words. And if one day I had to tease the pen like others wielded the Kalashnikov or the dagger, I would tell our dented trajectories. One day, a day would certainly come when I too would say, I would testify, I would write, whatever the cost. Salman Rushdie was paving the way for me.
Dissent
In the so-called Islamic world, writing is in itself a political act, a gesture of dissent. We cannot write in the present without rewriting the past. When the words are haunted by the ancient chorus of the Koranic text, condemnation is immediate.
To take up the pen is to take the risk of being attacked by the vultures who double-lock memory in order to draw their legitimacy from it, draw from it a host of privileges and keep societies in the slumber of origins. […].
What had he, Salman Rushdie, this novelist-transgressor, to delve into Islamic myth to tell a universal story, that of man in the face of uprooting and exile?
That Muslim believers would feel shocked by the writer’s outrage was (almost) self-evident. On the other hand, what always surprises me is the attitude adopted by Western intellectuals who feel obliged to defend Muslim bigots while they mock Christian bigots.
By anathematizing intellectual creation and establishing the presumption of guilt as a principle, the Rushdie affair marks, in the West, the beginning of an era of fear and cowardice.
To those who keep repeating: “We must be careful with Muslims, we must not insult them, stigmatize them”, I answer this: “Stop infantilizing us! I will give up my freedom when you have repudiated yours! Lift censorship! It is time to desacralize the sacred and put an end to the conspiracies of silence. Going into literature is a way of inhabiting the world, of reaching the universal. Long live Salman Rushdie!