Salman Rushdie’s attack is on everyone who believes Islam deserves special treatment

[Julian]

While the UK has stood by Rushdie all these years, we have seemingly
given up on the free speech ideals that the author has stood for



Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New
York state on Friday just as he was about to give a lecture. The attack
comes 33 years after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued the first formal
fatwa against Rushdie over the 1988 book The Satanic Verses – a
satirical take on religion, culture and identity in the Indian
subcontinent that followed up on Rushdie’s magical realist allegory of
the region in Midnight’s Children and Shame – putting a bounty of $3m
(£2.5m) on the author’s head for blaspheming against Islam’s prophet
Muhammad.

Over the past three decades, many translators and publishers affiliated
with The Satanic Verses have been killed or injured, including those in
Japan, Italy, Norway and Turkey. In all these years, Rushdie has
continued to feature prominently on the hit lists of jihadist groups,
from Hezbollah to al-Qaeda.

Fatwas calling for his head have been omnipresent in the Muslim world,
even in the officially secular Bangladesh and the “moderate” Malaysia
sinceThe Satanic Verses was published. A 1990 Pakistani film,
International Gorillay, was based on the lead actors plotting the
killing of Rushdie, who is eventually struck down by flying Qurans, as
the female protagonist exclaims: “Today your death will be a warning to
the rejectors of the prophet.” Pakistan’s recently ousted prime
minister, Imran Khan, continues to cite Rushdie in his recent bid to
export Islamic blasphemy laws to the West, expressing a similar desire
to instil global fear over sacrilege against Islam.

This quest of Khan, and his Islamist friends, such as Recep Erdogan and
Mahathir Mohamad, to prevent Islam from being treated as other religions
are, is already in vogue in the West. The European Court of Human Rights
has ruled that mocking Muhammad is a hate crime, even as cartoonists and
satirists exercising their freedom of expression against Islam have been
attacked in Denmark, Sweden and other parts of the continent.
Journalists affiliated with satirical publication Charlie Hebdo were
massacred for caricaturing Muhammad in 2015. Samuel Paty, a French
teacher who showed the Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his class, was beheaded
in 2020.

While the UK has stood by Rushdie all these years, even as his
knighthood in 2007 invited a backlash from many Muslim countries,
Britain has seemingly given up on the free speech ideals that the author
has stood for. In June, screenings of the film The Lady Of Heaven were
cancelled in the UK after protests about alleged blasphemy. Last year, a
Batley Grammar School teacher lost his job and had to go into hiding
after receiving threats for showing Charlie Hebdo caricatures in a class
on blasphemy. And the British press customarily joins the vast majority
of its Western colleagues in refusing to print any pictorial depiction
of Islam’s prophet even when reporting on the killings related to those
very images.

This at a time of the prevalence of gory blasphemy laws in the Muslim
world, with 12 Muslim-majority countries punishing the victimless crime
with death and 20 others with harsh prison sentences. In addition to
antediluvian codes in these countries, mobs continue to target
individuals by torching them in schools, hanging bodies from trees or
beheading them in shops because of blasphemy against Islam. Just as the
Muslim-majority countries enacting Islamic sharia obviously do not
uphold identical punishments relating to blasphemy against other
religions, many well-meaning progressives in the West forgo the founding
principle of free speech to shield Islam alone from critique.

The idea that Islam deserves special protection against offensive
expression is relentlessly encouraging blasphemy violence. And it is
this continued global privileging of Islam that has led to the murder
attempt against Salman Rushdie.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid