Fatwa in Chautaqua
On American soil, Iran nearly got what it's wanted for 33 years
In 1988, Indian-born British author Salman Rushdie published his fourth book, The Satanic Verses. The plot of the novel seems innocent, if odd, enough:
The book is set by turns in the London of Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and ancient Mecca, Islam's holiest site. It centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, whose hijacked plane explodes over the English Channel. They re-emerge on an English beach and mix with immigrants in London, the story unfolding in surreal sequences reflecting Rushdie's magic realism style.
But in its description of some facets of Islam, the book created a literal firestorm:
The book was deemed blasphemous and sacrilegious by many Muslims including over references to verses alleged by some scholars to have been an early version of the Koran and later removed. These verses allow for prayers to be made to three pagan goddesses, contrary to Islam's strict belief that there is only one God. Controversially, Rushdie writes of the involvement of a prophet resembling the founder of Islam, Mohammed.
The blasphemy and sacrilege begat riots by Muslims around the world, including in London, where Rushdie lived. Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (i.e., more or less, edict - more on that in a bit) calling for the killing of Rushdie.
Khomeini condemned Rushdie, as well as his editors and publishers in any language, to death. He called on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to go out and kill all of them—without delay—“so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr” and ascend instantly to heaven. Tehran offered a reward that eventually grew to more than three million dollars.
And kill they did. The Japanese translator of Verses was killed in 1991; the Italian translator was stabbed soon after; the Norwegian published was shot in 1993. That same year, Islamist protesters in Turkey torched the hotel occupied by a man who planned to translate the novel into Turkish. The man escaped but 37 others died in the fire.
Post-fatwa, Rushdie himself went into hiding for 10 years, under protection from the British government. His then-wife has said that the couple moved 56 times in the first few months after the fatwa was issued. Over time, the threat appeared to dissipate and Rushdie assumed a more normal life. He moved to New York City in 2000, and obtained his U.S. citizenship in 2016.
But the threat persisted. Last Friday, Rushdie was preparing to give a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York when he was attacked and stabbed 15 times on stage. As of this writing, Rushdie, after some time on a ventilator, is breathing on his own, but suffers from liver and nerve damage suffered in the attack. He is likely to lose an eye.
Police apprehended Hadi Matar and charged him with the attempted murder of Rushdie. Matar, who pleaded not guilty,
was born in the United States to parents who emigrated from Yaroun in southern Lebanon near the Israeli border, according to the village's mayor. Flags of the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah, along with portraits of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders, hang across the village. Israel also has bombarded Hezbollah positions near there in the past.
Matar’s mother, who disowned him after the attack, says he was radicalized during a 2018 trip to visit his father in Lebanon. VICE reports that Matar had social media contact with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - the same outfit that allegedly tried to assassinate former National Security Advisor John Bolton last year - prior to the alleged attack on Rushdie.
The Iranian government issued a statement following the attack, denying involvement but blaming Rushdie: “We don’t consider anyone deserving reproach, blame or even condemnation, except for (Rushdie) himself and his supporters.” An Iranian state newspaper was less tactful:
We don’t yet know whether the Iranian government or its proxies were directly involved in the stabbing (you’ll excuse me if I find the denial unpersuasive on its own). We also don’t yet know whether Matar, if he did indeed stab Rushdie as charged, was motivated to do so by the Iranian fatwa, his own religious beliefs, his apparently radicalizing trip to Lebanon, or something else entirely. But it sure looks for now like an American-born, radicalized Muslim assaulted, tried to kill and seriously wounded an American citizen, with longstanding spiritual and monetary bounty on his head, in a small town in western New York.
The response from President Biden and others has been properly condemning of the attack. The Washington Post, in a gut-churning article if there ever was one, wants us to know that, actually, fatwas are not so bad, but Western ignorance of them is:
Intisar Rabb, the director of Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law, said Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie has brought ignorance about the practice to the West.
“There is no historical instance or basis for calling on members of the general public to exercise vigilante justice to put someone to death for statements and, for that matter, for someone to follow such directives.”
Maybe Islamic Law works differently than, you know, plain English, but there is in fact at least one historical instance of someone issuing a fatwa calling for vigilante murder. And it sure looks like we might just have witnessed an instance of someone having followed that directive. Lama Abu-Odeh, a Georgetown University Law Center professor adds, “Other acts of violence toward those who have portrayed Islam in ways that some of its followers find offensive have made the violent association persist.” Read that remarkable sentence again. I had to read it three times to get the gist, which is more or less, that the mistaken Western association of fatwas with death sentences has been caused by the curious coincidence of people against whom fatwas are issued being subjected to violence. Weird, huh?
The WaPo and its Islamic scholar sources are far from alone in defending Iran’s fatwa and the resulting decades-long manhunt targeting Rushdie. Back in 1989, Jimmy Carter* asked Americans to be just a little more understanding:
Ayatollah Khomeini's offer of paradise to Rushdie's assassin has caused writers and public officials in Western nations to become almost exclusively preoccupied with the author's rights.
While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important, 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.
Where to start? First, the fact that Verses was viewed as a direct insult to at least some Muslims was plainly evident, even to 14-year-old me, because Muslims around the world rioted and burned Rushdie in effigy and threatened explicitly to kill him. But for that response, very few outside committed fans of the “magic reality” fiction genre, would have heard of the book to begin with.
Second, it’s not Rushdie’s First Amendment right to free speech that was at issue. That right comes into play when an American state or the federal government tries to regulate speech. In the case of the Iranian fatwa, the question for America was how or whether to respond when a self-professed eternal enemy of the United States and the West threatens and encourages international murder over words on the page.
The goal of the fatwa having been nearly achieved on American soil, we can ill afford to indulge in pondering the religious sensibilities of those who were involved in the attack, or those who encouraged it, directly or indirectly. The annoyance of those sensibilities cannot and never will justify the attempted murder of an American citizen. We, after all, are entitled to our sensibilities too.
*The frequency with which Jimmy Carter intersects with the events and issues of the past 19 months or so is deeply troubling.