Fatwa on Free Expression?

Christopher Hitchens' essay in Vanity Fair starts out as something of an ode to Salman Rushdie:

At a dinner party ...  somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up ... “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments.

This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is more like a musical than a literary one.

Delightful enough. But Hitch swiftly slides into his real point of interest. In revisiting the fatwa put on the head of Rushdie--and all those who 'aided' the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988-- by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, Hitchens recalls those who cowered and those who challenged the attempted assassination of free speech.

Two translators of The Satanic Verses were murdered. One was shot multiple times; another the target of an arson that killed 37. Rushdie went into hiding, and was accompanied by bodyguards for the next ten years who thwarted several attempted executions. Bookshops that sold the novel were firebombed.

(In The Guardian, Andrew Anthony details what the strange, twisty story--beginning in the morning Rushdie learned of his ordered execution while he happened to be attending the funeral of a friend)

Hitchens points fingers at the contemporary "pants wetters whose names I still cannot reveal" who avoided taking a stance to say, hey, maybe trying to kill someone for publishing a book is a bad idea. Granted, there was fear. Naguib Mahfouz was among those who added his name to a petition in support of Rushdie, even though he didn't like the novel. Five years later, he was stabbed in the neck for it.

But more than a revisitation of the past, Hitchens considers its legacy today, where media and publishers shy away from work that is critical of Islam. While he is, I think, far too dismissive of what he calls the "condescending multiculturalists"--that is, the people who try to understand another person's way of thinking, whether or not they agree with it--he makes a strong and worthy point about our collective responsibility for free speech.

To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?

... though I can think of many circumstances in which I would take a life, the crime of writing a work of fiction is not a justification (even in the case of Ludlum) that I could ever entertain. Two decades on, Salman himself is thriving mightily and living again like a free man. But the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force. 

Andrew Anthony at The Guardian chimes in on this point:

Who would dare to write a book like The Satanic Verses nowadays? And if some brave or reckless author did dare, who would publish it? The signs in both cases are that no such writer or publisher is likely to appear ...

What's frightening is that this censorship isn't a hypothetical. Both Hitchens and Anthony list incident after incident--in the world of literature, theater, music, religious texts, news media, film, and politics--where all or part of something has been excised, for fear that it might provoke Islamic extremists to violence.

It's awful, it's terrible, it needs to change. Perhaps our best strategy? Resist the fear that comes with free speech, and, perhaps most difficult, embrace the writing and language that appalls us.

I am not personally offended by The Satanic Verses (which I haven't yet read), and so it is especially easy for me to champion the right for the book to be written, published, sold, and read. But what of the person who writes a racist tome that glories in the cannibalization of children? What of poetry that deliberately and brutally satirized my family? Would I sign a petition for the protection and health of this writer?

I like to think I would. I like to think that my choice of resistance will be to put down the copy of the book that offends me, and ignore it. Or, if inspired, to speak up about my criticisms of the book and encourage others to dismiss it. Simply that. Issuing a fatwa on the offending writer seems laughingly extreme if it weren't such a real fact of this world, but that doesn't mean your standard fare censorship--deciding what information another person can and can't have by controlling their access to it--isn't also a horrifying threat.

Until we call it out, that is, and change.

Image Credits: New York Magazine; Wikipedia