The Rushdie Attack: Deeply Disturbing, Utterly Indefensible
Absent an alternative explanation, the attack most likely had something to do with The Satanic Verses, or the fatwa, or religious intolerance in general, which is deeply disturbing at many levels.
It is too early for now to comment upon the exact facts of what happened at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York on January 12, 2022 at about 10:47AM local time (about 08:17 PM IST), when Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked with a sharp object (probably a knife of some kind) by one Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old, New Jersy resident, whose motive for the assault remains unclear. Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, is reported to have said in an email, “The news is not good… Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.” That’s serious damage.
Rushdie had just taken a seat at the stage and the moderator of the discussion, Ralph Henry Reese, was introducing Rushdie, when the attacker darted to the stage from amid the audience sitting in the front and attacked Rushdie, having easily approached him from behind. Ironically, Rushdie was about to begin speaking about how the US was a safe haven for exiled writers. The talk was organized by a Pittsburgh nonprofit called City of Asylum, which runs a residency program for exiled writers.
While Matar’s exact motive is as yet unclear, what’s clear is, whatever was driving Matar had driven him to stab a human being he did not personally know as many as 10-15 times in less than twenty seconds before he was subdued. According to an eyewitness, Matar kept trashing about, trying to stab the author even after he had been pulled aside by no less than five people. We don’t know what was driving Matar for sure but we do know that the list of things that could drive a person as mad is not too long, and one of such things right at the top of that list is religion. And Rushdie has indeed ruffled the coarse feathers of many a religious hawk in the past, primarily by a book that was widely seen as poking fun at and insulting Islam and the Prophet — The Satanic Verses. India was the first country to impose a ban on the book and the ban remains in place to this day even though the book was never published in India.
The Rajiv Gandhi government banned the import of The Satanic Verses on October 5, 1988, within nine days of its publication in Britain on September 26, 1988 although the possession of the book was never illegal in India, meaning the stringent provision for the forfeiture of a published work under Section 95 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, was never pressed into service; yet it was a questionable exercise of power, which remained unchallenged. One can reasonably suspect that the government of the day did not invoke Section 95 because that could have heightened the risk of a constitutional challenge with the government on a sticky wicket for having clamped a pre-publication prohibition on a work of fiction a little too quickly and without extending a hearing to the author or the publisher of the work. What material the Rajiv Gandhi government had on the record to take a well-reasoned decision in this regard has never been clear, and if it was a precautionary step to maintain peace and prevent possible unrest, a post-decisional hearing, as would be constitutionally appropriate, should have been arranged. There is no record of any such move having ever been contemplated by the Rajiv Gandhi government. Also, since the book had never been published in India, an import ban could very well suffice, and did. Not that the import ban could not have been challenged, and constitutional courts might have found an import ban without good cause and without a hearing a bit too arbitrary to hold to the touchstone of the constitutionally required reasonableness, but the ban was never challenged in court. So it stayed.
The book was never published in India (the import ban does not automatically prohibit publication) and has not been readily available to the Indian readers. After the Indian import ban on October 5, 1988, Bangladesh, Sudan, and South Africa followed suit and banned the book in November 1988 followed by Sri Lanka in December 1988.
K Natwar Singh, the Union minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government that banned The Satanic Verses, has defended the book ban on the grounds that it was “purely" for law and order reasons and was not to “appease” the Muslim minority. The distinction that Singh is trying to make doesn’t really exist in this instance because the banning a book to prevent those who might be offended by the book, mostly without reading it, from taking to the streets (that’s what “law and order reasons” pretty much means) is basically appeasement of the potential rioters, which is way worse than minority appeasement.
To be fair, the precautionary import ban by the Rajiv Gandhi government does make sense in retrospect, which might be why it was not challenged before the constitutional courts. The book did cause a backlash; so much so that the Viking Penguin, the original publishers of the book could not find the courage to publish the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses in view of the furore and the Iranian fatwa, and chose instead to turn the paperback rights back to Rushdie upon his request in 1992, after which an anonymous group called The Consortium, Inc. published the paperback edition in March 1992. The paperback edition of the book was published by Random House only in 2008, two decades after its original publication in hardcover. In 1991, the Japanese translator of the book, Hitoshi Igarashi, was killed; and a few days earlier, the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed but survived the attack.
After the fatwa by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February 14, 1989, over four months after the Indian ban, Rushdie has lived under a constant death sentence. The fatwa not only ordered Muslims to kill Rushdie in the service of Islam but also placed a hefty price of several million dollars on his head. Nothing indicated, then or later, that Khomeini had ever read The Satanic Verses in English or in translation; certainly not before exhorting about a billion and half Muslims of the world to kill a writer in the name of Allah and the Prophet. So how did Khomeini decide The Satanic Verses insulted Islam or the Prophet? The Ayatollah, without having read the book, went on the Tehran Radio and broadcast a fatwa saying, "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content are sentenced to death."
Rushdie responded to the fatwa a few hour later: “I am very sad it should have happened… It is not true this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I doubt very much Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read this book or anything more than selected extracts taken out of context." However, the threat to his life was serious enough to force Rushdie into hiding under state protection for over a decade following the fatwa.
Most of those who were supposedly offended by the book had, most likely, never read the book. How exactly does the printed word offend you without your ever reading the offending printed word? How, in other words, could one be offended without actually being offended? Offence by transference? Offended because someone said that someone else had said or done something that ought to be taken offence of? Actually, yes. That’s how “religious feelings” mostly get hurt.
The vicious attack on Rushdie over three decades after he published a book that some thought blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet and the Qur’an, if he was attacked for that reason, is proof that a few even in the western world have not learnt the simple lesson that all the three are above and beyond mortal insult, contempt or ridicule; and no human being can arrogate to take offence on their behalf and ask of others to do the same without running the risk of insulting God, the Prophet and the Holy Book.
What could possibly be more offensive to the divine than for mere mortals to act on its behalf as though the divine couldn’t do, if it wanted to, something the mortals could? So if the divine doesn’t punish someone for something, it’s only because it doesn’t want to, and not because it can’t. To take into one’s hands retribution on behalf of the almighty is to declare the all-powerful inadequate. What possibly could be more blasphemous than insulting the divine in word and in deed by resorting to violence and/or asking others to do so?
Violence in the name of religion diminishes the religion as well as its practitioners in addition to endangering the lives of many innocent people, who might be looked upon with anger and hatred and may also be hurt for no fault of theirs. Religious intolerance begets the like; even though it shouldn’t, even though it only makes things worse and even though that simple truth is too plain to need explaining.
One can hope that the attack on Rushdie had nothing to do with The SatanicVerses, or the fatwa, or religious intolerance in general, but in the absence of an alternative explanation of Matar’s motivations, the attack most likely had something to do with at least one of those things. But still, let’s keep our fingers crossed until we know more.
Photo Credits: The New York Times, News Nine & The Mirror.