speech and respect - College of Social Sciences and International ...

The Struggle for Respect
heightened the hostility of Iran, which reiterated the fatwa in March
1991 and doubled the price on Rushdie's head. 50
Both sides expressed frustration at the stalemate. The International
Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie denounced the
British government for capitulating to Iran. But when prominent
intellectuals, artists, and media figures planned a 24-hour vigil in
London, New York, and Los Angeles to commemorate the author's
thousand days in hiding, the Foreign Office pressured Rushdie to
cancel the rally for fear of delaying the return of western hostages. At
the same time, Iqbal Sacranic, Joint Convenor of the U.K. Action
Committee on Islamic Affairs, wrote to The Guardian.
What bewilders is that nothing is being done or said to stop the
circulation of the book which continues to cause unspeakable
distress and anguish to more than one billion Muslims all over the
world. . . . [We] have consistently demanded its withdrawal and
appropriate public apology and redress by the publishers. 51
Rushdie now reversed his strategy. Appearing in public for the first
time in nearly three years, at a Columbia University tribute to the
First Amendment and retired Supreme Court Justice William Brennan,
he compared his plight to drifting in a balloon incapable of
carrying him to safety while gradually losing air.
20
[H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people,
burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you
can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? ...
[In the] upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world ... [a] novelist
can be accused of having savaged or "mugged" a whole community,
becoming its tormentor (instead of its ... victim) and the
scapegoat for... its discontents. . . .
I've been put through a degree course in worthlessness .... My
first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards,
baying for my blood and finding, soon enough, their echoes on
English streets. ... as I watched the marchers, I felt them trampling
on my heart. . . .
Sometimes I think that one day, Muslims . . . [will] agree, too,
that the row over The Satanic Verses was at bottom an argument
about who should have power over the grand narrative, the Story
of Islam, and that that power must belong equally to everyone.
I faced my deepest grief, my ... sorrow at having been torn away