In This Article
30-Second Summary
Headline Links: Rushdie's critics and supporters, then and now
Reactions: The international response to news of Rushdie's knighthood
Key Players: Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini
Opinion: Should Rushdie be knighted?
Opinion: The fatwa
Background: Rushdie, Le Carré, Hitchens
History: The Fatwa
Reference Material: "The Satanic Verses" and Knighthood
Related Links: Rushdie's divorce
Subscribe to International Updates
Rushdie’s Knighthood Prompts New Threats
by
findingDulcinea Staff
Muslim anger and al-Qaida threats follow the British government’s decision to knight novelist Salman Rushdie, who was condemned to death by Iran’s supreme leader in 1989.
30-Second Summary
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown spoke out on June 11 to defend the bestowment of a knighthood on Salman Rushdie. Brown was responding to al-Qaida’s deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who threatened Britain with terrorist attacks in retribution for Britain’s honoring the much maligned author.
At the root of these exchanges is Rushdie’s "The Satanic Verses" (1989), a novel a number of Islamic religious leaders condemned as blasphemous.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims around the world to kill the author and publishers of "The Satanic Verses." That edict, or fatwa, was issued on February 14, 1989.
The Iranian government tempered its stance on Rushdie 10 years later, and the author came out of hiding. However, the fatwa has never officially been lifted.
The British government’s June decision to knight Rushdie has reignited Islamic anger regarding "The Satanic Verses."
Relations between the West and Islamic states have clearly changed since 1989. Back then, many Western intellectuals accused Rushdie of rash insensitivity. Far fewer take that line today.
At the root of these exchanges is Rushdie’s "The Satanic Verses" (1989), a novel a number of Islamic religious leaders condemned as blasphemous.
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims around the world to kill the author and publishers of "The Satanic Verses." That edict, or fatwa, was issued on February 14, 1989.
The Iranian government tempered its stance on Rushdie 10 years later, and the author came out of hiding. However, the fatwa has never officially been lifted.
The British government’s June decision to knight Rushdie has reignited Islamic anger regarding "The Satanic Verses."
Relations between the West and Islamic states have clearly changed since 1989. Back then, many Western intellectuals accused Rushdie of rash insensitivity. Far fewer take that line today.
Headline Links: Rushdie's critics and supporters, then and now
These days “most intellectuals and editorialists are on Rushdie’s side,” writes Rachel Donadio of The New York Times. That said, Donadio considers it “instructive to return to the fatwa period, when some important literary and political voices were critical of Rushdie.” Among those critics were former President Jimmy Carter, and the writers John Berger and Roald Dahl.
Source: The International Herald Tribune
Reactions: The international response to news of Rushdie's knighthood
On June 23, Lord Ahmed of Rotherham, who sits in the House of Lords, the British parliament’s second chamber, condemned the decision to award Rushdie a knighthood. “Salman Rushdie lives in New York. He is [a] controversial man who has insulted Muslim people, Christians, and the British. He does not deserve the honor,” said Lord Ahmed. “What would one say if the Saudi or Afghan governments honored the martyrs of the September 11 attacks on the United States?”
Source: The Telegraph
On June 18, 2007, the Pakistani government’s lower chamber passed a motion condemning the British government for awarding Rushdie a knighthood. Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz-ul-Haq, during a parliamentary session, said, “If someone commits suicide bombing to protect the honor of the Prophet Muhammad, his act is justified.” He later returned to the floor to state that his comments were not intended to condone terrorism.
Source: The BBC
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini spoke out against Rushdie’s honor on June 17, 2007. Hosseini said, “Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is … a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials.”
Source: The BBC
On June 11, recently appointed British Prime Minister Gordon Brown defended his government's decision to honor Salman Rushdie. Brown was responding to an audiotape from al-Qaida's deputy leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, threatening Britain with vengeance.
Source: The International Herald Tribune
Key Players: Salman Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, in 1947, and educated at a private school in England and at Cambridge University, as explained in this profile of the author. His second novel, "Midnight's Children," won the prestigious Booker Prize for literature and was also judged years later to be the best book to have received that award. He became the center of international controversy after the publication of "The Satanic Verses" in 1988, a novel that led to his being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme religious leader.
Source: The British Arts Council
Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini (1902–1989) protested for many years against the rule of the U.S–backed Shah of Iran, until the Iranian government forced him into exile in 1964. He returned to Iran only after the revolution of 1979 overthrew the Shah. The next few years saw him working to consolidate clerical power: "Many people were laid off, and lots of books were revised or burnt according to the new Islamic values."
Source: Iran Chamber
Opinion: Should Rushdie be knighted?
The Knighthood, Pro-Rushdie
The bestowment of a knighthood on Rushdie is a sign that Britain is waking up to the folly of a policy of politically correct appeasement in the face of radicalized Islam, according to Sadanand Dhume of The Wall Street Journal. “Her majesty’s conferral is a welcome example of something that has grown exceedingly rare: British backbone," writes Dhume. "After years of kowtowing to every fundamentalist demand imaginable … the British seem to be saying enough is enough.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
The government decision to honor Rushdie is a step in the right direction, according to Observer journalist Nick Cohen. Having pandered to Islam’s religious right, “Government policy is now to support British Muslims who uphold liberal values and oppose those who do not,” writes Cohen. “Rushdie’s knighthood was a sign of the changing mood.”
Source: The Guardian
The author of a book on the Rushdie affair, Daniel Pipes, wishes he could believe “that this recognition of [Rushdie] suggests ‘the pendulum has begun to swing’ in Great Britain against appeasing radical Islam.” Instead, he concludes that the honor was given “without heed of its implications,” and that Rushdie and Britain should take great care.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
The Knighthood, Contra-Rushdie
London’s Islamic Human Rights Commission denounced the award for Rushdie in a statement issued on June 19: “It is now apparent that [Rushdie’s] abuse of a quarter of the world’s population and the subsequent deaths of scores of protesters is not only being supported but indeed honoured.”
Source: The Islamic Human Right Commission
Opinion: The fatwa
Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens
On a BBC TV discussion program in ’89 Yusuf Islam, aka Cat Stevens, appeared to equivocate when asked whether he would feel obliged to kill Salman Rushdie should the two men meet. “It depends on my mood,” Yusuf said. When pressed on the question, he said, “Not necessarily, unless I was in an Islamic state.”
Source: YouTube
In September 2004, Yusuf Islam was denied entry to the United States and flown back to London. The U.S. immigration authorities said he was included on a no-fly list because of his connection to Islamic charities suspected of funding militant groups.
Source: CNN
These days, Yusuf Islam refuses to discuss the comments he made back in ’89 about the Rushdie fatwa. So, as this Guardian journalist observes, “It’s impossible to discover whether his views on that fatwa have moderated.” Certainly, he has since taken a stance against militant Islam, having appeared at a benefit concert for the families of firefighters who lost their lives on 9/11.
Source: The London Times
In 1993, more than 100 Arab and Muslim writers banded together to produce "For Rushdie," a book written in support of the threatened novelist, then in hiding. “The veritable terrorism of which he is a target is unjustifiable, indefensible,” wrote the most prominent of those authors, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz.
Source: The New York Times
“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 Muslims whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility,” former President Jimmy Carter wrote in The New York Times in 1989. Carter suggested that Rushdie must have known what offense he would cause, and used as a comparison his own experience as a Christian pained by Martin Scorsese’s movie "The Last Temptation of Christ."
Source: The Jimmy Carter Center
Background: Rushdie, Le Carré, Hitchens
Rushdie-Le Carré-Hitchens Correspondence
An angry correspondence involving this three writers began when thriller writer John Le Carré complained publicly after being accused of anti-Semitism. Rushdie responded in a letter to a London newspaper asking whether Le Carré, who was highly critical of Rushdie at the time of the fatwa against him was issued, now understood what was like to be the victim of racial slurs.
An angry correspondence involving this three writers began when thriller writer John Le Carré complained publicly after being accused of anti-Semitism. Rushdie responded in a letter to a London newspaper asking whether Le Carré, who was highly critical of Rushdie at the time of the fatwa against him was issued, now understood what was like to be the victim of racial slurs.
British journalist and author Christopher Hitchens gave his take on the correspondence he entered into to defend Rushdie. Hitchens describes intellectuals critical of Rushdie, such as Le Carré, as “having decided that it would be boring to say all the obvious things” and consequently refusing to condemn what Hitchens describes as an unprecedented action: “A large bounty, offered in public, for the solicitation of murder, by the theocratic leader of a nation, against an author in another country, for the offense of composing a work of fiction.”
Source: Salon.com
The exchange of letters between Rushdie, Le Carré, and Hitchens is archived online on this blog.
Source: R.J. Geib
The trade in abuse between Rushdie and Le Carré was covered by The New York Times. Counter to the trend "in high places to have Britain portrayed as a sensitive, caring, compassionate nation,” writes the Times, “Mr. Le Carré and Mr. Rushdie were striking blows in the letters columns for the tradition of literary invective.”
Source: The New York Times
History: The Fatwa
A monument in Tehran, Iran, commemorates Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh, who died “on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie,” according to the inscription. Mazeh was killed in 1989 when a bomb he was priming in his London hotel room detonated. Neither the British nor the Iranian governments ever confirmed that the explosion was linked to an attempt on Rushdie’s life.
Source: The London Times
The folksinger Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam, appeared to condone the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death when he appeared on a British TV show in 1989. According to The New York Times article that appeared the next day, Stevens’s comments helped to “demonstrate how divided British liberal intellectuals remain over the Rushdie affair.” Representatives of the Church of England said that Britain’s blasphemy laws should be extended to protect non-Christian religions and, ironically, according to the author, one of Rushdie’s staunchest defenders was Margaret Thatcher, a target of some of his severest criticism.
Source: The New York Times
The New York Times has compiled a list of its stories on the Web covering Rushdie, arranged chronologically and according to subject.
Source: The New York Times
Reference Material: "The Satanic Verses" and Knighthood
This New York Times review of "The Satanic Verses" appeared before the Rushdie fatwa was issued. The book was already a source of anger among many Muslims, and the reviewer explains what passages were thought blasphemous. Simply put, the novel deals with an old Islamic heresy that holds it that Satan tricked the prophet Muhammad into including false teachings in the Quran, the holy book of Islam and reputedly the direct word of God.
Source: The New York Times
The Knighthood
Rushdie is to be made a bachelor knight, which though the lowest rank of knighthood still entitles the holder to be addressed as “sir." His name was on the Birthday Honours List, which honors British citizens who have demonstrated outstanding service to their country. The queen’s role in this process is mostly ceremonial, and it is the prime minister’s office that determines who is to appear on it.
Rushdie is to be made a bachelor knight, which though the lowest rank of knighthood still entitles the holder to be addressed as “sir." His name was on the Birthday Honours List, which honors British citizens who have demonstrated outstanding service to their country. The queen’s role in this process is mostly ceremonial, and it is the prime minister’s office that determines who is to appear on it.
According to this BBC report on Rushdie's knighthood, it is hard to say what thought process concluded with the author’s being knighted “for services to literature.” The BBC writes, “Although the people doing the nominating are supposed to remain anonymous, in Sir Salman’s case it looks as if his cheerleaders were the English branch of Pen, an international writers’ group.”
Source: The BBC
Related Links: Rushdie's divorce
Rushdie and his fourth wife, the Indian actress Padma Lakshmi, have agreed to a divorce at her request, a spokeswoman for the couple stated on June 2, 2007. The announcement was made two weeks after Rushdie received his knighthood.
Source: The BBC
Most Recent Beyond The Headlines
© 2012 Dulcinea Media, Inc.
