Off-centre | The attack on Rushdie is a wake-up call to unite against religious violence

The homicidal attack on Salman Rushdie on 12 August needs to be reframed in the global discourse. It is not only about defending free speech as many commentators, including famous authors such as JK Rowling, have highlighted. Instead, the attack foregrounds the global threat that Islamist extremism, intolerance, and violence pose. Unless the world unites against such terrorism in the name of faith, we are bound to witness repeated incidents of this sort.

How sadly ironic that on the eve of Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, when we commemorated and commiserated the sufferings of millions caused by the gruesome and bloody partition of India 75 years ago, the author of Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie, was severely injured in a knife attack in New York. The attacker, reportedly a Muslim fanatic called Hadi Matar, is in police custody.

A Partition’s child himself, Rushdie wrote what at least the Western critics and media considered the definitive book on India’s Independence from the British and the decline, even death-threat, to that independence during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in 1975. No wonder the book was awarded not only the Booker Prize in 1981, but it is the only novel to win the Booker of Bookers not once, but twice, in 1993, on the 25^th anniversary of the prize, but also in 2008, when the prize turned forty.

Unfortunately, it is not Midnight’s Children, which gave offence to Indira Gandhi, but The Satanic Verses (1988), which nearly caused his death, that made Rushdie world-famous. It not only exposed him to Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence in 1989, but forced him to apologise, go into hiding, and change his residence over twenty times. After being stabbed repeatedly by Hadi Matar, Rushdie was on a ventilator and may even lose an eye. While most of the free world has condemned the attack, several Muslim organisations and individuals voiced their support for Matar and his murderous assault, even congratulating him for it.

Perhaps the most shockingly unpleasant and dangerous of these endorsements came from Iran’s right-wing newspaper, Kayhan: “Bravo to this courageous and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and depraved Salman Rushdie in New York. Let us kiss the hands of the one who tore the neck of the enemy of God with a knife.” The fatwa on Rushdie was never taken down and can still be found on the Iranian state’s website. What is more, the reward for Rushdie’s death was upped from Khomeini’s $3 million to a whopping $6 million, additional amounts pledged not only by Iranian religious organisations but by media outlets in that country.

The Islamist retaliation against The Satanic Verses across the world has already left a trail of blood, with publishers and translators slaughtered, and several more dead in riots in India, Pakistan, Turkey, and elsewhere. India, incidentally, was the first country in the world to ban the book. Rushdie was also prohibited from appearing at the Jaipur Literature Festival after Islamist organisations in city threatened the organisers with dire consequences. All this is well known and bears repetition only for one reason. Rushdie’s stabbing some thirty-four years after that fateful book has once again highlighted the elephant in the room that no one wants to talk about or take seriously even today.

The Rushdie incident needs to be seen in the light of genocide and displacement of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s, the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, the 9/11 attack on the US (3,000 killed), the Bali bombings of 2002 (200 killed), the Madrid train killings of 2004 (192 killed), the London underground bombings of 2005 (50 killed), the Mumbai train explosions of 2006 (200 killed), the genocide and sexual slavery of the Yazidis from 2007 onwards by the Islamic State (several thousand killed), the 2008 attacks on Jaipur, Ahmedabad, and Mumbai, India (300 killed), the Moscow train bombing of 2010 (40 killed), the Borno, Kano, and Baga massacres of 2014-15 in Nigeria (520 killed), the slaughter of Christian students in Garissa University, Kenya in 2015 (148 killed), the Charlie Hebdo murders of 2015, the Sri Lankan Easter massacre of 2019 (270 killed), and several other such continuing acts of deliberate terror and violence by Islamic radicals the world over.

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A look back at the protests against Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses

‘Rajiv Gandhi banned my book because of Muslim votes’, Rushdie had said in a 1998 letter

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What is listed above is merely synoptic and symptomatic. The total list, with all the gory details, is yet to be compiled. Part of the problem is how to define Islamist terror or violence. Would the Partition violence running into several hundred thousand killings, rapes, and abductions be included? Would the Turkish massacre of Armenians and Kurds amounting to millions also find place in such a list? Or the recent targeted murders in India of those who supposedly supported Nupur Sharma? Or, to take a broader view, the casualties in the jihadist attacks all over the world during the last fifty years or so when Islamist fanaticism got a new fillip largely because of the oil money that OPEC embargos and price rises generated?

Many religions and ideologies, including Christianity and Communism, have been misused violence and genocides in the past. Indeed, one might go as far as to assert that no religious tradition is entirely free of violence, including even Buddhism and Jainism, which are professedly non-violent. Yet, we must confront the bitter truth that today it is in the name Islamist extremism that gravest threat to the freedoms that we cherish are posed.

To counter it, civil society the world over must stop looking the other way, succumb to apologetics, or participate in a conspiracy of silence. Governments the world over must take serious note, dot the i’s and cross the t’s as it were, tracing the linkages and sharing intelligence, to prevent further outbreaks of this sort. More importantly, the religious leaders of the Islamic world and elsewhere, especially those who are the custodians of holy sites, need to come out with unequivocal condemnations of such violent acts, whether by individuals or groups, in the name of their religion.

It is time to create a more humane, tolerant, and compassionate world where we cease to take offence when our faiths are supposedly insulted. Please, we must appeal to these religious zealots, not convert perceived insults to rage and injury against others. An end to religiously inspired or justified violence the world over is a prerequisite for human peace, progress, and unity.

The author is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal.

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