“The almost unanimous support for Rushdie after the fatwa very quickly crumbled, including in culture”
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SAlman Rushdie received fifteen stab wounds on August 12 in the United States. Since then, analysts have pointed to a discrepancy: the writer’s support was much greater in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini gave him a fatwa for his book. The Satanic Verses, than today. Because it is much less accepted to see a Western artist shock the Muslim community.
There is another reason, quite simple and dominant: fear. That of dying in the fight for freedom of expression. It is much more present than thirty years ago and we know why. When there was the attack on the Bataclan, Charlie Hebdo, other attacks, we are silent. When Rushdie escapes around twenty attempted murders in the ten years following the fatwa, sees publishers and translators murdered or seriously injured, then, after twenty years of calm, comes close to death, we understand that this does not encourage not to appear at his side.
After the attack on Rushdie, surveys show that many creators in exile in the United States are petrified, live under protection and go into hiding. Ron Charles, in the washington post of August 15, notes that the list is growing. Let’s add the annual report of the Danish NGO Freemuse, which takes into account the assassinations, wounds, rapes, attacks, threats of which creators are victims all over the world. Again, the list swells and religion is the driving force.
Silence and self-censorship
Yet analysts speak little of fear, no doubt because the notion is fragile, intimate. Nor is it in the vocabulary of political leaders – to mention it would be an admission of weakness. Artists are another story. Silence and self-censorship, companions of fear, are the norm. Let us salute here Isabelle Adjani who had read in public, in 1989, an extract from satanic versesand much later, in 2015, declared to the Point : “Unless I voluntarily put my head on the block, I could no longer do this kind of symbolic provocation. We are condemned to a form of reserve, it is a terrible admission of powerlessness. »
For a month, the few creators openly evoking their fear while firmly defending Rushdie often come from countries of the South. They are considered as repeat offenders by their invisible executioners, and have nothing more to lose except their lives. They are Boualem Sansal, Abnousse Shalmani, Taslima Nasreen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, up to the Italian Roberto Saviano, threatened by the Camorra.
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