Stand with Salman
Hundreds of writers are to gather in New York this week to read from Salman Rushdie’s works, in a recreation of an event first held after the fatwa on the author was issued in 1989.
Authors including Paul Auster, Tina Brown, Kiran Desai, Amanda Foreman, AM Homes, Siri Hustvedt, Hari Kunzru and Gay Talese will be among those taking part in the “Stand with Salman” event.
The writers will gather on the steps of the New York Public Library on Friday morning, exactly a week after 75-year-old Rushdie was stabbed during an event at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York.
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Friday’s event is being organised by PEN America, the New York Public Library, Rushdie’s publisher Penguin Random House, and House of SpeakEasy. PEN America said those gathering would “read from selected texts from Rushdie’s body of work”.
Read on.
In the meantime, books are being challenged for school libraries and often removed. One being “Handmaid’s Tale,” another being “The Diary of Anne Frank.” This article from January explains:
https://www.axios.com/2022/01/17/a-book-purge-surge
I found it linked from a story about Fort Worth suburb, Keller, pulling books from the shelves before the school year. While this is not a fatwa and no authors have been threatened, the drive to suppress reading and expression of ideas and people who express them continues from many sources. It’s not a “right wing” thing, It’s not a “left wing” thing, it’s an authoritarian thing. In Keller it’s used to control the kids, make sure they remain right-thinking and never get exposed to ideas that counter what their parents want them to know.
The Keller school district also pulled the bible from school library shelves. These are libraries, reference and borrowing material, not assigned reading. I agree wholeheartedly that this is an authoritarian thing. They are appeasing factions or making a point. We do this because we can.
I had a bit of an argument with a fellow who thought it was perfectly appropriate to pull the bible, and that the bible should only be on the shelves if accompanied by a ton of other books from non-Christian religions. I disagreed, specifically because these are libraries we’re talking about, not assigned reading. Add those books when necessary, don’t purge any of them, and there’s no reason to insist that a bunch of other books be added merely to justify having a bible on the shelf.
Mind you…if there are books in school libraries that sing the joys of “gender-affirming hysterectomies”…