In the past, when they went down to the bottom of the coal mines, the miners took with them a canary locked in its cage. When the bird stopped singing or died, it gave them the clue to the presence of poisonous gases and the signal to come to the surface as soon as possible.
More than thirty years ago, the affair of the satanic verses should have played this role of canary in the mine. By reacting unanimously and without showing any weakness, Western countries and their governments could still have saved freedom of expression. In particular, they could have informed those of their citizens of the Muslim faith seduced by Islamism that blasphemy is an imaginary crime, that burning books, whatever they are, is unworthy of a democratic society, and that if a book shocked them so much, they just didn’t have to read it.
Instead, from the first protests and burnings in Manchester, Bradford, and then London, politicians and cultural figures presented a disunited front. Labor MPs, supported by English writers and intellectuals, proposed to vindicate the Islamist protesters by extending to all religions the blasphemy law (which was then in force in England, but concerned only Anglican worship, and had hardly been invoked for a long time); a public reading of good pages of the novel was canceled; the latter was also withdrawn from several bookstores; elsewhere in Europe, a publisher delayed the publication of the book, while another gave up trying to have it translated.
compromises
Meanwhile had fallen the famous fatwa of the ayatollah Khomeini, which condemned to death the novelist, his editors and even all the readers of the novel.
We know the rest: the writer forced for more than thirty years to live as an outcast, his head having been put at price; the attacks against a Californian bookstore, against its Italian translator, its Turkish translator, its Norwegian publisher, the assassination of its Japanese translator, etc.
But above all, the compromises, already: the mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, denouncing the fact that the novelist used blasphemy for the sole purpose of “making money”; others reproach him for “having looked for it well”; the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin not agreeing to join a demonstration organized to support him; the Swedish Academy (the very one that awards the Nobel Prize for Literature) refusing to publicly condemn the Khomeinist fatwa, and so on.
Such compromises have multiplied over the new attacks that have since been the subject of freedom of expression. They contributed to normalizing and trivializing the attacks that took place during the following decades with the assassination, in the Netherlands, of Theo van Gogh, in 2014, the appalling Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 in Paris, the beheading of French professor Samuel Paty in the middle of the street; it was in 2020.
Each time, these crimes, each more horrible than the other, have been followed by the same procession of small or large acts of cowardice, of “yes, but”; these thousand and one ways of expressing one’s suspicion towards the victims while seeking excuses for the censors and fanatical killers.
Self-censorship
Since then, self-censorship has triumphed. It must be admitted that, against the freedom to express one’s ideas, the daggers of the assassins and the online denunciations which put a target in your back are excellent arguments. All the more so when you have been convinced beforehand that the institutions and even the governments supposed to defend it will rather reproach you for having used it in an inconsiderate way. So we prefer to be silent. It’s human. The subjects that we fear to address publicly, the words that must no longer be pronounced, the works that must be banned are thus multiplying.
For thirty years, the situation of freedom of expression has not improved. It is the least we can say. At the risk of repeating ourselves, we are obliged to recognize that the affair of the satanic verses has not led, as one might hope, to an awareness of the threats posed to this fundamental freedom not only by radical Islamism, but also by all the “offended” by profession and, with them, those, many , who believe that it is legitimate to prohibit comments likely to appear as blasphemous or even as offensive to someone somewhere. We can even say that the latter hold the upper hand today. They run universities, school boards and television stations.
So, we can certainly, and we must feel sorry for the still uncertain fate of Salman Rushdie, who is, at the time of writing these lines, in a hospital in the State of New York. But there is one point that is not in doubt and that we must keep in mind at the same time: the authors of the fatwa who armed the arm of his attacker won. A strange inversion now makes these gravediggers of freedom of expression victims, and victims of censorship culprits, odious characters, suspects among other things of Islamophobia.