Satanic Verses controversy
[1] The affair had a notable impact on geopolitics when, in 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.
[5] The issue was said to have divided "Muslims from Westerners along the fault line of culture,"[6][7] and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression – that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write"[8] – against the view of some Muslims that non-Muslims should not be free to disparage the "honour of the Prophet" or indirectly criticise Islam through satire – and that religious violence is appropriate in contemporary history in order to defend Islam and Muhammad.
[13] He wrote a book bitterly critical of US foreign policy in general and its war in Nicaragua in particular, for example calling the United States government, "the bandit posing as sheriff".
The title refers to a legend of Muhammad; a few verses were supposedly spoken by him as part of the Qur'an which praised the pagan goddesses of Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat.
[22] Other issues many Muslims have found offensive include Abraham being called a "bastard" for casting Hagar and Ishmael in the desert;[23] and a character named Salman the Persian who serves as one of the Prophet's scribes, an apparent reference to the story, controversial among Muslims, of a Meccan convert by the name of Abd Allah ibn Sa'd, who left Islam after the Prophet failed to notice small changes he had made in the dictation of the Qur'an.
[citation needed] Daniel Pipes identified other more general issues in the book likely to have angered pious Muslims: A complaint in the book by one of the character's companions: "rules about every damn thing, if a man farts, let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind ...", which was said to mix up "Islamic law with its opposite and with the author's whimsy";[21] the prophet of Rushdie's novel, as he lies dying, being visited in a dream by the Goddess Al-Lat, on the grounds that this suggested either that she exists or that the prophet thought she did; the angel Gibreel's vision of the Supreme Being in another dream as "not abstract in the least.
[24] A complaint by one of the characters about communal violence in India: "Fact is, religious faith, which encodes the highest aspirations of human race, is now, in our country, the servant of lowest instincts, and God is the creature of evil".
[30] The City of Bradford gained international attention in January 1989 when some of its members organized a public book-burning of The Satanic Verses, evoking as the journalist Robert Winder recalled "images of medieval (not to mention Nazi) intolerance".
In New York, the office of a community newspaper, The Riverdale Press, was all but destroyed by firebombs following the publication of an editorial defending the right to read the novel and criticising the bookstores that pulled it from their shelves.
[38][39] On 18 February, Iran's President Ali Khamenei (who would later that year succeed Khomeini as Supreme Leader) suggested that if Rushdie "apologises and disowns the book, people may forgive him".
[40] On 19 February 1990, Ayatollah Khomeini's office replied: The imperialist foreign media falsely alleged that the officials of the Islamic Republic have said the sentence of death on the author of The Satanic Verses will be retracted if he repents.
[50] Meanwhile, in America, the director of the Near East Studies Center at UCLA, George Sabbagh, told an interviewer that Khomeini was "completely within his rights" to call for Rushdie's death.
[51][52] In May 1989 in Beirut, Lebanon, British citizen Jackie Mann was abducted "in response to Iran's fatwa against Salman Rushdie for the publication of The Satanic Verses and more specifically, for his refuge and protection in the United Kingdom".
Two months earlier a photograph of three teachers held hostage was released by Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine with the message that it "would take revenge against" all institutions and organisations that insulted in one way or another "members of the Prophet Mohammed's family".
Lewis added that "[a] judge will then give a verdict and if he finds the accused guilty, pronounce sentence", and that "[e]ven the most rigorous and extreme of the classical jurists only require a Muslim to kill anyone who insults the Prophet in his hearing and in his presence.
[37] Muhammad Hussam al Din, a theologian at Al-Azhar University, argued "Blood must not be shed except after a trial [when the accused has been] given a chance to defend himself and repent".
[68] On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain, the Iranian government, then headed by reformist Muhammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie".
[69][70] In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
[3] In 2007, Salman Rushdie reported that he still receives a "sort of Valentine's card" from Iran each year on 14 February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him.
It broke diplomatic relations with UK on 7 March 1989 giving the explanation that "in the past two centuries Britain has been in the frontline of plots and treachery against Islam and Muslims".
[93] The author of the book himself was not immediately killed or injured as many militants wished, but visibly frustrated by a life locked in 24-hour armed guard – alternately defiant against his would-be killers and attempting overtures of reconciliation against the death threat.
In late July, Rushdie separated from Wiggins, "the tension of being at the centre of an international controversy, and the irritations of spending all hours of the day together in seclusion", being too much for their "shaky" relationship.
[100] Some of the explanations for the unprecedented rage unleashed against the book were that: Despite the passionate intensity of Muslim feeling on the issue, no Western government banned The Satanic Verses.
Western attitudes regarding freedom of expression differ from those in the Arab world because: The last point also explains why one of the few groups to speak out in Muslim countries against Khomeini and for Rushdie's right to publish his book were other writers.
Former US president Jimmy Carter, while condemning the threats and fatwa against Rushdie, stated, "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility".
He also held that Rushdie must have been aware of the response his book would evoke: "The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world".
[127] Rushdie, however, was supported by major bodies in the literary world such as PEN and Association of American Publishers, and prominent figures such as Günter Grass, Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, and Derek Walcott.
[128] Another major supporter of Rushdie, Christopher Hitchens, said that the fatwa persuaded him that Islamic fundamentalism was an urgent menace, and later wrote God Is Not Great, a polemic against religion.
[2]"The death sentence and the reward money are flagrant breaches of international law and rules of civilised interaction within the world community and therefore can in no way be compatible with normalisation.
The Swedish Academy decries the retention of the death sentence for Salman Rushdie and that state-controlled media are permitted to encourage violence directed at a writer.
