You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom Read Online Free PDF Page B

African Writers had invited him to visit Johannesburg in 1988 to discuss the censorship of the opponents of white rule. Rushdie had to pull out because of death threats from Islamists. The white-skinned rulers learned they could now rely on brown-skinned religious extremists to intimidate a writer who was proposing to come to their country and denounce their regime.
    Even before the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa, Rushdie had many enemies, but they were not dangerous enemies. The Indian government regularly banned books it thought might provoke communal violence. Jamaatists in Pakistan and white supremacists in South Africa had always threatened authors. An Anglo-Indian writer based in London had little to fear from them. Intellectuals who had made it to the West were beyond the reach of oppressive forces. They had a place of sanctuary.
    The fatwa changed all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind. It ensured that London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam could no longer be places of safety for writers tackling religious themes.
    Journalists throw around the word ‘unprecedented’ so carelessly and ceaselessly that we miss the new when it stares us in the face. Khomeini’s incitement to murder was without precedent. Here was a head of state ordering the execution of the private citizens of foreign countries for writing and publishing a work of fiction. A grotesque regard for the forms of legality had accompanied previous outbreaks of state terrorism. Even Stalin forced his victims to confess at show trials so that when he murdered them, he did so with a kangaroo court’s approval. No such concern with keeping up appearances inhibited Khomeini. On 14 February 1989, he said that the faithful must kill Rushdie and his publishers and ‘execute them quickly, wherever they may find them, so that no one will dare insult Islam again. Whoever is killed in this path will be regarded as a martyr.’ Just in case zealous assassins doubted that they would receive eternal life in paradise along with the services of seventy-two virgins, an Iranian foundation offered the earthly reward of $3 million.
    There was not even a show trial. Khomeini did not listen to the religious scholars who said that as Rushdie was not a citizen of an Islamic state, he could not punish him for blasphemy or apostasy. And he took even less notice of the more substantial objections from secularists that no one had the right to order the murder of a writer for subjecting religion to imaginative scrutiny.
    Far from making himself the object of repulsion, the Ayatollah’s endorsement of state-sponsored murder won him many followers. After the death sentence, preachers whipped up mobs against Pakistani Christians in Islamabad. In Bombay, twelve died in battles with the police. A bomber murdered a security guard at the British Council offices in Karachi. In Dhaka, fifteen thousand people tried to break through police lines and ransack the British Council’s library. In the United States, Islamists threatened bookstores and firebombers hit the offices of the Riverdale Press , a weekly paper in the Bronx, after it published an unexceptional editorial saying that the public had the right to read whatever novels it pleased.
    In Britain, demonstrators in Bradford burned copies of The Satanic Verses . I doubt they had heard Heinrich Heine’s line that ‘Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings’ – a condemnation from the German Enlightenment of the burning of the Koran by the Spanish Inquisition, ironically enough. Onlookers were entitled to wonder whether Heine was right, and Rushdie’s British enemies would burn the human being in question if they could get hold of him. As in America and Europe, British bookshops withdrew the novel in the face of threats – two independent bookshops on the Charing Cross Road were bombed, as were