For Arab authors, the Rushdie attack awakens old demons

It was not released in Arabic, its rare fragmentary translations circulating under the coat in restricted circles: satanic verses could have gone unnoticed in the Arab world had it not been for the Iranian fatwa against its author Salman Rushdie. Because thecall for murder launched on February 14, 1989 by Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini caused Arab writers to react, themselves regularly attacked by authoritarian regimes for having opposed them or by their fellow citizens for writings deemed immoral.

When Salman Rushdie’s satirical novel was published in 1988, the Arab world was gripped by the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which left one million dead on both sides, and the first Intifada Palestinian. It is in Great Britain and in the Indian subcontinent – where Salman Rushdie is from – that the book will attract all the wrath. There, tens of thousands of demonstrators booed a book which they said “insulted” the Prophet Muhammad.

What shocks readers in English, Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif, who was living in Britain at the time, told AFP, is “the trivial vocabulary used to describe the prophet, radically opposite to the usual reverential tone”.

What he wrote in his novel can in no way justify a fatwa making his murder a religious duty.

Lebanese writer Fawwaz Traboulsi,

In the Arab world, on the other hand, nobody talks about the novel. Al-Azhar, the highest religious authority in Sunni Islam based in Egypt, banned the book with the visibly provocative title in that country. In fact, the idea of ​​verses inspired by Satan is not unknown to doctors of religion who have seen them pass during their theological studies. Some events mentioned in the novel “are recorded in several of the earliest biographies of the prophet”adds Ms. Soueif.

But what will ultimately catch the attention of the Arab world is Khomeini’s fatwa. From then on, the affair was no longer just a question of literary opinion or religious feeling, it was also political, and a few days later, some forty intellectuals from Damascus published an open letter entitled “Defending the writer’s right to live”.

“We are not here to defend the book but its author, his right to live and also his right to write”, say the signatories, denouncing book burnings and condemnations, sometimes to death, of thinkers since the Middle Ages. One of them, the Lebanese writer Fawwaz Traboulsi, said it again on Facebook on Sunday: “What he wrote in his novel can in no way justify a fatwa making his murder a religious duty”.

Social networks

Already in 1993, when radical Islamists were assassinating thinkers in Algeria, like Tahar Djaout, or in Egypt, like Farag Foda, figures of Arab literature had responded with the pen, like the Palestinians Edward Saïd and Mahmoud Darwich, the Lebanese Amin Maalouf or the Algerian Mohammed Arkoun. “To an idea, you can only oppose an idea”protests the Egyptian writer Naguib MahfouzNobel Prize for Literature in 1988, who will survive an assassination attempt perpetrated in 1994 by two Islamists who will admit at their trial that they have never read his books.

Like an echo on Saturday, when the whole world was watching a scene from New York State where a young man was stabbing Salman Rushdie, Egyptian author Ezzedine Fishere tweeted: “It is the assassination attempt on Naguib Mahfouz that is starting again!”. Because today, it is indeed on social networks that information and cultural objects circulate, notes the Egyptian intellectual Sayed Mahmoud, just like online fatwas.

After the Arab “revolutions” of 2011, which saw dictators fall, Islamists come to power and now being sidelined for a return to authoritarianism by leaders posing as secular, “it is much more difficult for a representative of political Islam to find a platform to support the attack on Rushdie”he told AFP.

Despite everything, the day after the Rushdie attack, the Lebanese journalist Redouane Aquil came out “for the application of the fatwa” while affirming “do not condone an assassination attempt”. And to add: “If we insulted Christ, I would say the same” because “there are limits and taboos”.

As to satanic versesthey are now available in Arabic, but on private Facebook groups or via online links, out of sight.