This Valentine's Day, Read "the Satanic Verses"

Not so long ago, Shirley Williams, a Liberal Democrat member of the British House of Lords, appeared on the BBC’s Question Time programme; when asked by a member of the audience if she thought Salman Rushdie should have been given the knighthood, she replied: “I think it was a mistake... This is a man who has deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way, who has been protected by the British police against threats of suicide for years and years at great expense to the taxpayer, and frankly, I think it was not wise, and not really clever, to give him a knighthood.”

Even if you leave aside the contemptible manner in which Rushdie, one of our greatest living authors, is dismissed as “this man,” you cannot escape the cruel logic that underpins Williams’s conclusion: recognition of Rushdie’s achievements should be tempered with deference to his bigoted detractors; his merits should be measured through the eyes of those terrorists who sought to murder him. But Williams is hardly alone. Islamic extremists have always found sympathisers among Western liberals.

On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader of Islamic Iran, issued a fatwa exhorting believers to murder Salman Rushdie and all those associated with his novel The Satanic Verses. It was unprecedented: the theocratic leader of a country calling on his coreligionists worldwide to execute a private citizen of another countryÑfor the crime of writing a novel!

Yet many openly refused to support Rushdie. Roald Dahl accused Rushdie of cheap sensationalism; Germaine Greer had no time for “that book of his"; and John le Carre expressed the absurd view that Rushdie could calm the situation by withdrawing his book. The impulse to reflexively castigate Rushdie was characteristic of those who held a chivalric sense of innate superiority over the community whose sensibilities they accused Rushdie of offending. It was supremely condescending stuff.

The values which the Ayatollah’s fatwa assaulted were not the preserve of any one civilisation or communityÑthey are universal values, and they form the essence of liberal democracy everywhere. But the reactions the fatwa provoked among some of the custodians of those values were decidedly indifferent.

India, Rushdie’s homeland, became the first country to sacrifice free-speech at the altar of intolerance. Kowtowing to sectarian pressure, Rajiv Gandhi banned the book. The Anglo-American response was marked by what Julian Barnes at the time described as “glacial indifference.” Geoffrey Howe, Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the time, took pains to assure the Iranian regime that the British people “do not have any affection for the book.” Even Jimmy Carter chimed inÑalthough his condemnation of Iran, if it can be called that, was so qualified that it is difficult to tell which side he was on. Even before directing some mild criticism at Khomeini, Carter peremptorily declared that “Rushdie’s book is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Carter must clearly have been well-acquainted with the reading habits of these “millions” of Muslims to denounce a novel of magical realismÑwhere the allegedly blasphemous action takes place in the dreams of a dazed characterÑas deeply offensive.

The timidity of governments was matched by the ferocity of the protestors. Rushdie miraculously escaped deathÑalthough the privations suffered by him in hiding were probably even harder to endureÑbut many others associated with his book weren’t so lucky. The novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered; its Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot but managed to escape death; its Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked with knives; and 37 people lost their lives in an arson attack that was mounted to murder the book’s Turkish translator, Azin Nesin. The men who committed these crimes were not frustrated members of a beleaguered community whose rage could be pacified by concessions; they were religious fanatics who could not abide the freedom to think and speak freely. They were harbingers of things to come.

The failure of liberal democracies to stand up firmly for the ideal of free-speech expanded the space that was available to, and legitimised the destructive ways in which it was used by, religious bigots. Yesterdays Islamists are today’s “community leaders.” Iqbal Sacranie, for instance, once said that “death, perhaps, is a bit too easy” for Rushdie. Years later, he received a knighthood from the British government for “services to the community.”

Twenty years on, a cottage industry of religious intolerance has taken shape. In this decade alone, Theo van Gogh was knifed to death for making a documentary about the Koran; Taslima Nasreen has had to flee a dozen times from religious bigots “offended” by her memoirs; M.F. Hussain, India’s greatest painter, has been forced into exile by that country’s Hindu bigots; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali has been abused and persecuted for speaking her mind. As if to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Satanic Verses, Random House last year withdrew Sherry Jones’s book The Jewel of Medina for fear, once again, of “offending” religious sensibilities; and the house of Jones’s British publisher was fire-bombed by some “offendees”Ñresourceful young men who managed to get hold of advance copies of a book that very few people have read in Britain.

Salman Rushdie often points out, with pain infusing his soft voice, that the three cities he has loved most Ñ Bombay, London and New York Ñ have suffered terrorist attacks in the last eight years. Maybe we can never overcome those in our midst who seek to find “causes” to explain away assaults on our way of life. But on this twentieth anniversary of the late Ayatollah’s fatwa, a small way to honour all those who fought, and continue to fight, with their lives to protect our non-negotiable values would be to read The Satanic Verses.