Tag: Salman Rushdie

  • The Swedish Academy

    A mere 27 years after the fatwa was first issued, the Swedish Academy steps up and says it’s a bad thing.

    The Swedish Academy, which selects the winners of the Nobel Prize in literature, has condemned an Iranian death warrant against British writer Salman Rushdie, 27 years after it was pronounced.

    Two members quit the academy in 1989 after it refused to condemn Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, against Rushdie for allegedly blaspheming Islam in his book “The Satanic Verses.” Citing its code against political involvement, the academy issued a statement defending free expression but without explicitly supporting Rushdie.

    Well done by the two members who quit. Condemning an incitement-and-bribe to murder a writer does not have to be defined as “political involvement.”

    But anyway, they’ve stepped up now.

    However, in a statement posted on its website Thursday, the academy for the first time denounced the fatwa and reward money for Rushdie’s death as “flagrant breaches of international law.”

    It didn’t specify what prompted its change of heart, but cited state-run Iranian media outlets’ recent decision to raise the bounty by $600,000.

    “The fact that the death sentence has been passed as punishment for a work of literature also implies a serious violation of free speech,” the academy said, adding that literature must be free from political control.

    Rushdie responded on Twitter, saying “I would like to thank the Swedish Academy. I am extremely grateful for its statement.”

    People are murmuring that the Academy may not be finished with Salman just yet.

    Kerstin Ekman, one of the members who resigned from the academy in 1989, welcomed the move.

    “It took a few years but here it is. I think it is very good,” Ekman told Swedish public radio. She said she doesn’t plan to return to the academy, whose appointments are for life.

    Maybe they could send her an invitation.

  • Just a place where people talked

    A little more from Joseph Anton, which is an encyclopedia of the kind of bad thinking that’s been going on for the past week. It takes place in France, which is fitting, and mentions a beloved friend of mine.

    At the first meeting of the so-called “International Parliament of Writers” in Strasbourg he worried about the name, because they were unelected, but the French shrugged and said that in France un parlement was just a place where people talked. He insisted that the statement they were drafting against Islamist terror should include references to Tahar Djaout, Farag Fouda, Aziz Nesin, Ugur Memeu and the newly embattled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen as well as himself. Susan Sontag swept in, embraced him, and spoke passionately in fluent French, calling him un grand écrivain who represented the crucial secularized culture the Muslim extremists wished to suppress. [p 397]

    Plus ça change, eh?

  • Being pushed into ever-narrower definitions

    I’ve been reading Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton again, and I keep finding poignant ironies and echoes de nos jours.

    Like when he goes to Stockholm to receive the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, “given to writers resisting persecution.”

    The Swedish Academy met in a beautiful rococo room on the upper floor of the old Stockholm Stock Exchange Building. Around a long table were nineteen chairs upholstered in pale blue silk. One was for the king, just in case he showed up; it stood empty if he did not, which was always. On the backs of the other chairs were Roman numerals from I to XVIII…He* had been granted permission to enter literature’s holy of holies, the room in which the Nobel Prize was awarded, to address a gravely friendly gathering of gray eminences. Lars Gyllenstein (XIV) and Kerstin Ekman (XV), the academicians who had withdrawn from this table to protest their colleagues’ pusillanimous lack of response to the fatwa, did not attend.

    Their chairs were a vacant rebuke. That saddened him; he had hoped to bring about a reconciliation. The academy’s invitation had been offered as a way of compensating for their earlier silence. [pp 359-60]

    See what I mean? Ironies, full of ironies.

    Another passage, not ironic this time but eloquent and elucidating.

    In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory…

    This was what literature had always known. Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed into ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha’i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. [pp 627-8]

    That’s why he gets the big bucks – writing like that.

    *Rushdie uses “he” in this book the way Hilary Mantel does in Wolf Hall, and it’s just as apt to be confusing. He uses “he” to mean “I” but there’s often another he present, or several, so the result is confusion, which does not happen with “I.”

  • It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation

    If you want to see people saying good, intelligent, reasonable things, you can do worse than check out Salman Rushdie’s Twitter. He’s RTd several such things.

    Joel Gordon @JoelGord13 hours ago
    Do Charle Hebdo opponents at PEN realize that boycotting their award normalizes murder as opposition to speech?

    @JoelGord It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation. This is why none of their analogies to American racists, etc. works.

    There’s Azar Nafisi:

    Azar Nafisi ‏@azarnafisi
    .@PENamerican @SalmanRushdie PEN award to CH is recognition of the writers’ &artists’ rights to “disturb the peace,”regardless of the price

    .@SalmanRushdie @PENamerican Satanic Verses didn’t insult true Muslims, it offended their oppressors who treated their own authors same way

    Also of interest is a Storify by Dylan Horrocks. He was working in a bookshop in 1989, and he remembers what the fuss over The Satanic Verses was like. He remembers people on the left being full of agonized doubts. Should the paperback come out?

    Was it an unnecessary provocation? Shouldn’t we be trying to heal the wounds caused by the book & fatwa? Some argued we should respect the views of Muslims offended by the book, as a marginalised minority who had suffered under colonialism, Western invasion & war, racism & cultural imperialism. Above all, a slow subtle undermining of Rushdie’s credibility: he’s over-rated, it’s a lousy book, he’s not a proper Indian, he’s culturally colonised, arrogant, disrespectful, deliberately offensive, racist. As a young leftist writer & cartoonist, I found it all very confusing & disturbing. People were persuasive. I remember vividly 2 things: 1. The fear of being on the wrong side & confusion about which side that was. 2. The pervasive sense of Satanic Verses as something tainted, toxic, dirty. When the pbk came out at last I bought one & remember keeping it hidden on the way home, like something illicit, pornographic. The Charlie Hebdo murders has brought back these vivid memories because the reaction has been SO similar. I see young well-meaning leftists having the same doubts & fears & confusions, for exactly the same reasons. And the same ongoing murmur of denegration, dismissal, accusation & shaming. So no, @tejucole, don’t tell me the @SalmanRushdie Affair was completely different. Because I was there & it was very much the same.

    I was there too, albeit not working in a bookshop. But I was there in the sense that I paid close attention. But I didn’t have those doubts. Why not? I think because even then I was far too passionately unwilling to be told what to do by god-huggers to have doubts of that kind. People blaming Rushdie for the fatwa seemed grotesque and disgusting to me even then. People blaming Charlie Hebdo for their own murders seems grotesque and disgusting to me right now.

  • When she continued to refuse to make a religious vow

    Remember the attack on Zainub Dala last month? After she said at a writers’ festival in Durban that one of the many writers she admired was Salman Rushdie? Well now, according to PEN America, she’s been shoved into a mental institution. Bookslive.co.za reports:

    Now, according to PEN America, the shocking news has come about that Dala has been put under “extreme pressure” by members of the Muslim community in Durban to “renounce her statement about Rushdie’s work” and “to make a public vow of religious loyalty to Islam”.

    When she refused, she was apparently admitted to a mental institution.

    PEN America has called for Dala’s “immediate and unconditional release” and has also called on President Jacob Zuma and the South African Authorities to “ensure Ms Dala’s safety and to prevent reprisals against her freedom of expression and thought”.

    The PEN statement:

    PEN American Center expressed outrage at the harassment and confinement in a mental institution of South African psychologist and novelist Zainub Priya Dala (ZP Dala) exacted in reprisal for her comments in appreciation of the writing of former PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie. Speaking at a literary event at a school several weeks ago, Dala voiced public appreciation for Rushdie’s work. Shortly thereafter she was the victim of a violent attack in which the assailants referenced her praise for Rushdie. She was hit in the face with a brick and had a knife held to her throat, resulting in a broken cheekbone. Regrettably, rather than rallying around Dala, some members of the local Muslim community in Durban, South Africa, have ostracized Dala, putting her under extreme pressure to renounce her statement about Rushdie’s work, to repent for her “sins,” and to make a public vow of religious loyalty to Islam. When she continued to refuse to make a religious vow or other statements inconsistent with her personal beliefs she was admitted to a mental institution.  A psychologist by profession, Dala is the mother of a young child and ultimately consented to go to the hospital to avoid intense and intrusive harassment at her home. She also reports continued questioning about her beliefs by hospital staff.

    It just never ends.

  • He annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past

    Now to look at each one in more detail, though not calmly.

    Protests from “influential Muslim clerics” in India have prompted the organizers of a literary festival in Jaipur to take Salman Rushdie’s name off the list of speakers. He was scheduled to speak at three events during the five day festival.

    The BBC explains in the way it invariably does.

    Mr Rushdie sparked anger in the Muslim world with his book The Satanic Verses, which many regard as blasphemous.

    No he didn’t. Mr Rushdie wrote a novel. Some people chose to become enraged about the novel and its author. He did not “spark” anything, nor did he do anything wrong. Many regard many things as blasphemous. If we take them seriously then they win.

    The Times Of India newspaper reported that the government of Rajasthan state – where Jaipur is located – had persuaded the organisers to “ask Mr Rushdie… to call off his visit”.

    Bullies 1, literature 0.

    Last week, the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary’s vice-chancellor, Maulana Abul Qasim Nomani, called on the government to block Mr Rushdie’s visit by “cancelling his visa” as he “had annoyed the religious sentiments of Muslims in the past”.

    “In case of no response from the government, the Darul Uloom Deoband will take appropriate action,” Mr Nomani said.

    Bullies 1, literature 0, government 0, secularism 0, freedom of expression 0.