Rushdie’s Moral Heroism

Rushdie’s attacker was taken into custody and charged with attempted murder. However, his victim sustained serious injuries in the frenzied attack. Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s agent, gave the disturbing news that Salman would likely lose one eye, his nerves were severed, and his liver had been stabbed and injured.

The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. It was banned in India the following year and copies were set on fire during protests in Bradford, UK. After the publication of the book in the United States, an American Cultural Centre was attacked in Islamabad. Khomeini’s fatwa was broadcast by Iranian radio on February 14, 1989.

We are from Allah, and to Allah will we return. All brave Muslims around the globe are informed that The Satanic Verses is the author. This text was written and edited against Islam and the Prophet of Islam. It also includes all editors and publishers who were aware of its contents and condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Allah will make a martyr of anyone who dies in this cause. If someone has access to the author but cannot execute the execution, he should notify the people, so [Rushdie] can be punished.

Rushdie isn’t the only one Iran has attempted to terrorize. 

The result was a tsunami of bloodshed. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator was stabbed and 37 people died in an attack on the book’s Turkish translation. Although the violence and threat levels seemed to diminish with time, Rushdie was able to come out of hiding and resume public life. However, his new sense of security proved to have been illusory. The most worrying lesson was that no one marked for death can afford to relax or return to “a normal” life.

Iran continues to terrorize others with its murderous fanaticism, even though it is trying to renegotiate a nuclear agreement with the West. American law enforcement officers have discovered assassination plots against Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser, John Bolton, and dissident Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad. Also, Roya Hakakian, an Iranian-American poet (and Contributor) has been exposed. Hakakian, who wrote in the New York Review of Books a year ago, recounted how her 13-year old child opened the door for FBI agents. They then told Hakakian that Iranian operatives had plotted to kill her.

In a timely essay Quillette, published in Mai, Paul Berman noted:

Roya Hakakian is friends with Masih Alinejad, as noted by Hakakian in the New York Review. The combined threats against them suggest a wider policy of violence and intimidation from the Islamic Republic and its operatives here in the United States.

This policy is not only for a few inconveniently articulate Iranian emigres but also for the larger Iranian emigration circles in America and elsewhere. Those members will pause to think before speaking out about oppression in Iran back home. This is a display of power. It terrorizes. It can do this regardless of whether any plot is foiled or suspended or merely intimated.