Salman Rushie has spent decades living under threat from religious zealots after a religious leader in Iran called for him to be put to death for the alleged blasphemy of his book The Satanic Verses. On Friday, an assailant attacked Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York, stabbing the 75-year-old author multiple times. Rushdie is now reportedly on a ventilator with serious injuries and may lose an eye, according to his agent Andrew Wylie. A 24-year-old New Jersey man named Hadi Matar is in custody.
Even with a decades-long fatwa hanging over Rushdie, the attack is still shocking. While he spent many years in hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a fatwa on his head, and there was a $3m bounty offered for his murder, the author has, in recent years, been much more public. Initially, he tried to be reasonable: he said he regretted hurting people’s feelings (“I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam,” he said in 1989), and he suspended the paperback release of the book to let the dust settle – a move he said later he regretted.
Since then, Rushdie has not apologized for creating art that offended the delicate sensibilities of religious people who can’t seem to let God handle his own business. He has refused to cower in the face of so many calls to violence. His refusal to hide or take his work back also reveals the cravenness of those who have long sought to justify or downplay the threats on his life – a group that includes, shamefully, a number of self-styled liberals.
Standing up to extremism and standing for the rights of free speech and expression, particularly in the face of threats to one’s life, is laudable and incredibly brave. The world should have rallied around Rushdie when he initially came under threat. Appallingly, it did not. Now, though, with the benefit of hindsight and the understanding of the immediate, life-threatening stakes, we can collectively change course.
People who believe criticism, mockery, or even insult to religion should never be a crime, let alone a capital offense – decent people, in other words – should speak up for Rushdie, and against the many nations worldwide that criminalize blasphemy. As of 2019, some 40% of countries worldwide had blasphemy laws on the books. That’s not just backwards and dangerous, it’s embarrassing. Certainly any god worth worshipping is able to handle petty insults on his own – and if he believes that taunting an all-powerful and omniscient being is grounds for death, why in the world are you worshipping that guy?
The attack on Rushdie is abhorrent, but it is not isolated. Others who have been accused of criticizing or insulting religion have also faced threats to their lives; many have been imprisoned and even sentenced to death; others have been murdered for insisting on free expression.
Attacks on free speech run the gamut. While violence is obviously shocking and appalling, we should also reject attempts to shut down texts or other pieces of art simply because they offend someone’s beliefs. Of course every culture has its taboos. One question worth asking is whether a particular taboo is worth enforcing either legally or socially; to answer that, we have to assess the potential harm in breaking it. Social rules – and certainly legal rules – that are simply about protecting privileged people from hurt feelings or challenging ideas, and where the harm is no larger than taking offense because of one’s religious or other beliefs, should fall.
And yet the world over, people insist on erecting them. In the US, religious conservatives have long sought to use the power of the state to shut down speech and expression they dislike, from pulling arts funding because of pieces that offend Christians to attempting to ban books because they are about queer identity and therefore “obscene” to pushing state laws that limit how teachers can discuss gender and sexual orientation. And liberals have their censorious impulses too, although, importantly, they seem inclined to rely on cultural institutions and businesses more than the state. Globally, free speech is depressingly under-supported. And as of 2015, 40% of young people in the US troublingly told researchers they were OK with the government limiting speech if that speech was offensive to minority groups.
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game,” Rushdie told an audience at Columbia University in 1991, as he continued to live under siege. “Free speech is life itself.”
And that includes, absolutely, the right to offend. People may think you’re a jerk; they may tell you you’re being offensive; depending on the speech or the art and the context, you may lose friends or supporters, and you may deserve it (Rushdie, for the record, did not deserve it). But no one deserves to be threatened or criminally penalized for their work or for words that simply caused offense. And frankly, we would collectively be better off if we could engage with, criticize, and even reject pieces of literature or art without calling for their removal or censorship. We would absolutely be better off if we stopped treating religion as a special category of belief for which no insult is justified, and which is deserving of special levels of deference (not to mention, in the US, vast privileges and benefits, including to discriminate, not accorded to other groups).
Religion is a belief system. If yours cannot stand up to criticism, interrogation, and even mockery or insult – if you need to threaten or punish, up to the point of death, those who insult an idea you hold dear – it is perhaps worth asking if your beliefs are as strong as you believe they are. And this is the lesson of Salman Rushdie: it is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants and those who would use violence to suppress words and art – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
