Emily Warner discusses the issues that have arisen in the shockwaves of Salman Rushdie’s attack.
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When there is a car crash, every vehicle on the road slows down. As a child I used to wonder what was causing so much traffic. Maybe debris from the cars was obstructing the road or perhaps even people were. Perhaps a tree had fallen over, or a bridge had caved in, or Spiderman was saving someone from a car (I think I might have stolen this idea); the longer we waited the more extraordinary and inflated my fantasies became. Finally, as we crawled past the accident, I’d strain from the window to see and realise that everyone else was doing exactly the same thing and our fascination was, in fact, the reason for the hold up. We were the unscathed seeking out the damaged, the anodyne searching for the controversial, spectators fascinated by the morbid. Is this not the same as wanting to read Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses? There is, admittedly, something exciting about trespassing through the restricted section (why else would Harry Potter do it so frequently?) which begs the question; is buying his book really an act of resistance or is it just the innate human desire to access something ‘forbidden’?
These are the thoughts which plagued me after hearing about Salman Rushdie’s attack on 12 August 2022. The 75-year-old author was preparing to give a lecture in New York when he was stabbed on stage multiple times. The attack was supposedly fuelled by Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses which, at the time of its publication in 1988, sparked controversy, book burnings and a $3 million fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination. However, I later learnt that the attacker read only two pages of the novel. For the average reader that is about 3.3 minutes. Can 3.3 minutes of reading really warrant becoming an executioner?
Knowledge of the attack rapidly spiralled into an onslaught of public support. Articles seemed to materialise with unbelievable frequency, sporting titles such as ‘Horrifying, ghastly: authors condemn attack on Salman Rushdie’, ‘Salman Rushdie teaches us an invaluable lesson’ and ‘It’s Time for Salman Rushdie’s Nobel Prize’. From one perspective, this outcry is endearing, supportive of an author’s freedom. Another perspective however, might scoff at the sudden interest and wonder, why now? Does it really require violence and controversy to generate public interest in a book? Apparently it does, as book sales of The Satanic Verses soared following the attack, requiring a reprint of the novel. This fact adds even greater poignancy to something Salman Rushdie wrote in 2012 about the success of The Satanic Verses when it was first published; “No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list [...]. He himself well knew, as did Irving, that scandal, not literary merit, was driving the sales.”
Salman Rushdie’s fame has always been and will always be accompanied by infamy; they are two sides of the same coin and it is a coin which politicians, religious leaders, authors and ordinary people have been flipping continuously since he first published his novel. It seems unfair to hold Rushdie responsible for the im - measurable shockwaves his novel caused, whose scandal left him “truly perplexed”. But if this is the case, it is also hard to distinguish between his skill and the simple allure of his controversy. David Remnick proposes in The New Yorker that Salman Rushdie deserves a Nobel Prize for his literary expertise. But even if he did, the question of whether scandal motivated the reward would inevitably and eternally hang over it.
Despite these questions of authorship, accountability and moral ambiguity, it is Salman Rushdie’s refusal to grovel or apologise which makes him revolutionary. In The Disappeared (his personal account of the period after the fatwa) the most poignant passage describes his writing process. The Satanic Verses was a novel about, “how the world joins up—[...] how the past shapes the present even as the present changes our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the frontier separating it from the ‘real’ place in which human beings mistakenly believe they live.”
This deeply personal, considered and beautiful description of the book explains why he felt it was crudely reduced to an ‘insult’. It was defended with the lofty principle of free speech when in - stead he wished people would “defend the text”. When he was initially encouraged to apologise for the book, Rushdie, writing in the third person, said, “Could this really be the deal he was being offered—that he would receive government sup - port and police protection only if, abandoning his principles and the defence of his book, he fell to his knees and grovelled?” Instead, he apologised for the distress caused by his book, refusing to ac - knowledge the correlation between his story and the scandal surrounding it.
The attack on Rushdie occurred significantly on a stage; somewhere open, unafraid, unapologetic. A place where he was sharing his words. This shows that despite the voyeuristic fascination his book caused and the threat he was under, Salman Rushdie continued to talk and to write. Other authors such as Ian McEwan and Leïla Slimani have found inspiration in him as a writer, not as a spectacle. He has shown the world that literature can be powerful, not because it is misinterpreted or banned or contested but simply because it tells a story; a story which needs to be heard.