At first, Rushdie asserted that he only wished his book had been more critical. “It seems to me,” he said, “that Islamic fundamentalists could do with a little bit of criticism right now.” On February 18, however, after a possible suggestion by Iran’s president, Sayyid Ali Khamenei, that the fatwa might be reversed if he apologized, Rushdie stated: “I profoundly regret the distress the publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.” Yet Ayatollah Khomeini promptly proclaimed, “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of [all] time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he’s got, his life and wealth, to send him to hell.”18
While Khomeini’s death edict against a British citizen led the United Kingdom to freeze relations with Iran, it was Tehran that officially severed relations on March 7, after Britain refused to condemn Rushdie’s book. In a statement carried by the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s government cited an alleged “anti-Islamic campaign” by “the world oppressors and the West, which find genuine Islam against their objectives and plots.” Other Muslim countries, some of which had led their own efforts against The Satanic Verses prior to February 14, did not risk fully associating themselves with the Iranian fatwa. On March 16, the OIC declined to back the fatwa directly but condemned Rushdie’s “blasphemous” novel and called on countries “to ban the book and take all necessary steps to protect sacred religious beliefs.”19
Tensions in Britain soon escalated. On May 27, participants in an approximately 20,000-strong London demonstration shouted, “Rushdie must die,” hung him in effigy, and delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street calling for the widening of Britain’s blasphemy laws. Clashes with police led to eighty-four arrests. The violence inspired two Labour MPs, Keith Vaz, and Max Madden, to suggest banning the book; Vaz actually led 3,000 protesters “intent on burning an effigy of Rushdie.” Other establishment figures were also less than sympathetic to the author. Historian Lord Dacre declared he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring Mr. Rushdie’s manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”20
Following Khomeini’s death in June 1989, the Iranian government attempted subtly to distance itself from his fatwa. It suggested that, while the decree could only have been altered by Khomeini himself, Iran’s political leaders did not wish it to be treated as their handiwork, nor did they want it to become a complicating factor in their relations with Western governments. This, however, did little to ease the pressure on Rushdie and others affected by the fatwa. There were major demonstrations outside the headquarters of publisher Viking Penguin in January 1990, and a Viking spokesman said his organization had been the target of “a stream of threats and violence.”21
Following his unsuccessful apology of February 18, Rushdie, still in hiding, insisted that the reaction was his attackers’ problem, not his. Then, once again, he altered his position under pressure. In May 1990, some Britons suggested he should apologize and withhold a paperback version of Verses. This was to be done, at least in part, in order to improve relations with Iran, which was believed to have control over terror groups holding British hostages in Lebanon. In September 1990, Rushdie stated that “if people have been upset, I’m sorry,” that he had not meant for his work to be interpreted as an insult and that his life in hiding was “hell.” If Muslims wished to punish him, he noted, they already had. Only hours later, Britain announced it was resuming diplomatic relations with Iran, and British officials suggested Rushdie would no longer have to live in hiding.22
Nevertheless, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati told an interviewer that there was “no change … When somebody insults the main Islamic values and Islamic principles, you cannot ignore it.”23 This was the first of many similar misunderstandings between Iran and the United Kingdom. Rushdie emerged from hiding for the first time in early December of 1990. At the same time, Iran’s culture minister, Mohammad Khatami, reaffirmed the death sentence against him.24
In November, Rushdie stated on television that he agreed with Muslims that Britain’s blasphemy laws were unfair, that they protected only Christianity and should be replaced with a law against incitement to religious hatred, a charge for which he was sure his own novel would not qualify. Meanwhile, when rumors surfaced that Rushdie was in talks with Muslim leaders, several British Muslims, including Dr. Kalim Saddiqui of the Muslim Institute and Abdal Chowdury of the British Muslim Action Front, took exception to the idea of any such discussion, asserting that the fatwa should not be lifted.25 Nonetheless, Rushdie’s talks with less militant British Muslims bore some fruit.
In late December 1990, after an extended discussion on the meaning of Rushdie’s prose, Dr. Hesham El-Essawy of the Islamic Society for the Promotion of Religious Tolerance suggested that the novelist did not mean for the anti-Islamic remarks contained therein to be taken seriously. He also said that Rushdie had not been a Muslim believer when he wrote the novel but had since become one and was therefore not an apostate but a convert. El-Essawy proposed that Rushdie engage in a similar conversation with scholars at Al-Azhar.26
On December 24, 1990, in a statement witnessed by an Egyptian secretary of state and a number of Islamic scholars, Rushdie affirmed that he was a Muslim believer and declared that he did not personally “agree with any statement in my novel The Satanic Verses uttered by any of the characters who insults the prophet Mohammed, or casts aspersions upon Islam, or upon the authenticity of the holy Koran, or who rejects the divinity of Allah.” He promised not to allow his novel to be published in paperback or retranslated “while any risk of further offense exists” and stated he would “continue to work for a better understanding of Islam in the world, as I have always attempted to do in the past.” British Muslim leaders such as Iqbal Sacranie welcomed the statement but continued to call for the book’s withdrawal from circulation.27
Assaults and Threats through the 1990s
Whatever respite these events provided for Rushdie personally, his statement did not end the danger to others associated with his work.28 Professor Mushirul Hassan, an Islamic historian, was threatened with death by Indian Muslims in New Delhi after he called on the Indian government to lift a ban on the book. In Milan on July 4, 1991, a man claiming to be Iranian brutally assaulted Ettore Capriolo, the novel’s Italian translator, who survived, despite being attacked with a knife as well as kicked and beaten on the head.29
A Pakistani Muslim attacked publisher Gianni Palma at the February 1990 press conference where he announced that he planned to issue a Japanese version. Raees Siddiqui, later to become president of Japan’s Pakistan Association, told Palma that “we won’t let you live.” The Islamic Center of Japan pressed for bookstores not to stock the novel. On July 12, 1991, the Japanese translator of Satanic Verses, literature professor Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in his university office. Siddiqui commented that it was “natural that Igarashi should be killed.”30
In 1993, 100 Arab and Muslim writers submitted essays defending Rushdie and free speech, published as Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabeset musulmans pour la liberté d’expression.31 Despite a ban on The Satanic Verses in Turkey, in February 1993, secular editorial writer Aziz Nesin, of the left-leaning Turkish paper Aydinlik, declared (apparently without the author’s permission) that he would publish a Turkish translation. This decision produced calls in Iranian papers for the fatwa against Rushdie to be applied to Nesin as well. It also earned Nesin trouble with the Iranian public and authorities. When Aydinlik began carrying excerpts of the book in May, Turkish prosecutors initiated legal proceedings against the paper, and authorities seized copies of the paper. On July 2, a crowd of 10,000 protesters gathered outside a hotel in Sivas where Nesin and a number of other leftist intellectuals, primarily members of the Alevi Muslim minority, were meeting. The mob then attacked a cultural center, bookshops, ca
fes, and some cars outside the hotel. They finally set fire to the hotel itself and, for a time, blocked firefighters from reaching it. Thirty-five people died in the blaze; sixty were injured.32
On October 11, 1993, William Nygaard, owner and CEO of Aschehoug Forlag, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was shot three times while getting into a car outside his Oslo home. Although seriously wounded, he survived the attack. Nygaard had previously contacted the police about threats following Verses’ initial Norwegian publication in April 1989.33 The would-be assassin was never apprehended, and, in late 2010, police reopened the investigation after the publisher and the Norwegian Publishers’ Association offered a reward for information “primarily to defend Norwegian values of freedom of expression.”34
Throughout the decade, Iran’s stance on Rushdie remained convoluted, and the novelist and his collaborators on Verses remained, and probably still remain, at risk.35
Salman Rushdie’s alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses gained unusual prominence because of Ayatollah Khomeini, who was capable of inspiring considerable fear given his prestige among many Islamist radicals and his proclivity for orchestrating assassinations beyond national borders.36 Yet, as is revealed by the threats and protests against The Satanic Verses predating Khomeini’s edict, the effort to suppress Rushdie’s work enjoyed a significant base of support beyond Iran. It is thus, perhaps, unsurprising that well after the ayatollah’s death and the Iranian-British meeting that allegedly “meant everything” for Rushdie, outbursts of global anger over Rushdie’s novel were easily reignited. More important, the implied principle introduced through international threats, protests, and violence in response to Rushdie’s novel lived on: the principle that blasphemy committed in the Western world should carry a penalty as if it were committed in a Muslim country.
Twelve Danish Cartoons
Some years later, in 2005, enormous turmoil resulted from allegations that, as reported in Newsweek magazine, a Qur’an had been flushed down a toilet at the U.S. Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The story was later refuted, but not before global rioting against America and its treatment of suspected terrorists. It was not, however, the actions of the U.S. government, but the editorial decisions of a private Danish newspaper, that came to occupy the center of the next international blasphemy controversy. Unlike the Newsweek imbroglio of the previous year, the Danish cartoons affair of 2006 concerned no allegations of specific government abuse. But, thanks to a group of dissatisfied Danish Muslims, popular Mideast-based Islamic leaders, and governments purporting to speak in the name of religion, twelve allegedly blasphemous drawings in a private paper—one with few readers in Islamabad or Cairo—became the seed of the widest-reaching international crisis regarding blasphemy in recent history.
Denmark’s prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen steadfastly insisted that the illustrations in a private newspaper were not the concern of his government or any other. But his declarations fell on deaf ears as a wide range of Muslim leaders seized on the incident as a pretext to call for a blasphemy ban with global reach. In countries where such a ban had already taken hold, editors uniformly suffered state retribution for daring to display the cartoons, regardless of their reasons for doing so. Other more permissive countries were subject to boycotts, diplomatic pressure, and threats of violence as a result of their unwillingness to censor. The Western response in the face of these demands was mixed, with some officials touting freedom of expression, and others suggesting this freedom could not entail the right to insult religion. Some attempted to have it both ways.
Like The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons, having once been invoked across national borders as a quintessential Western offense against Islamic values, have remained controversial ever since. The running debate over the twelve drawings—initially published in support of the notion that the right to free expression necessarily includes “scorn, mockery and ridicule”—has drawn reactions across the board, from those who adamantly support that right, from those who oppose it on principle, and from those who believe it is an acceptable casualty of intercultural harmony.
The Cartoons and Their Origin
The twelve cartoons were originally published in Denmark’s largest-circulation newspaper, Jyllands-Posten. Jyllands-Posten leans right of center but is far from being an organ of the xenophobic far right. As recently as May 2005, a Jyllands-Posten article on integration had won second place in a European Union contest on the theme “For Diversity. Against Discrimination.”37 Nonetheless, the paper also engaged in hard-hitting coverage of Islamic radicalism, and its staff had become concerned about the widespread fear in Europe of displeasing its Muslim population.
After Kare Bluitgen, the author of a Danish children’s biography of Muhammad, was unable to find an artist willing to provide illustrations under his own name, Flemming Rose, Jyllands-Posten’s culture editor, asked all forty-two members of the Danish newspaper illustrators’ union to draw images of Muhammad, as they envisioned him. The paper published the work of the dozen who participated.38 According to editor-in-chief Carsten Juste, the cartoon project was intended to explore “whether self-censorship exists in Denmark to a greater degree than generally acknowledged.”39
The September 30, 2005, issue carried an article by Rose warning that fear, whether warranted or not, was creating a climate of self-censorship in Denmark with regard to important issues surrounding “the most important cultural meeting of our times, the one between Islam and the secular, western society with its roots in Christianity.” In addition to the children’s book illustrations, he cited an art gallery that had taken down works deemed offensive by Muslims. He also described the desire for anonymity by the translators of a volume of essays criticizing Islam and discussed calls by a Muslim religious leader for Denmark’s government to pressure the media into depicting Islam in a more positive light.
Rose argued that in a “temporal democracy … you must be ready to tolerate scorn, mockery and ridicule.” Having served as a correspondent in the former Soviet Union, he added, “It is not by coincidence that people in totalitarian societies end up in prison for telling jokes or depicting dictators in a critical way.” In his judgment, Denmark was “approaching a slippery ground, where no one can predict where self-censorship will end.”40 Rose’s article was accompanied by the twelve images of Muhammad. These ranged widely, from a simple portrait of Islam’s prophet walking in a desert, to the controversial image of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, to a depiction of a frightened-looking cartoonist huddled over a portrait titled “Muhammad” as he drew.41
These cartoons could be considered offensive to Islam in two main regards. One is the unflattering manner in which several of the drawings depicted Islam’s prophet, particularly in the case of the bomb-turban. Critics have interpreted this drawing as an accusation that Muhammad himself was a terrorist. But the cartoon’s creator, Kurt Westergaard, has explained that he intended to satirize the hijacking of Islam by violent extremists.42 Many also stressed that such images, by their very existence, contravene prohibitions by Muslims of any visual images of Muhammad whatsoever. However, there are numerous representations of Muhammad in historic Muslim art. Such works are housed in the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace. Images of Muhammad appeared in illuminated manuscripts dating from as early as the thirteenth century and as late as the eighteenth century.43
Sunni Islam, in modern times, has prohibitions against depicting the Prophet or his companions. Sunni theologians at Al-Azhar University continue to prohibit his portrayal, as does the Muslim Brotherhood, and iconoclastic theology has been promoted with particular vigor by the conservative Wahhabi sect, supported by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.44 Shia tradition is less stringently opposed to such depictions. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani of Iraq, a prominent Shia cleric, suggests on his website that portraying the Prophet is not problematic as long as the depiction is respectful.45 A primary reason for barring images of Muhammad is the preve
ntion of idolatry, a concern that clearly did not apply to the cartoons.46
Although the cartoons were published in September 2005, international violence and bloodshed, supposedly representing spontaneous outrage in the “Muslim Street,” did not occur until several months later. The change in atmosphere was due in no small part to the work of three controversial Danish imams, Raed Hlayhel, Ahmed Akkari, and Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban. They organized the Committee for the Defense of the Honor of the Prophet, which involved twenty-seven leaders of mosques or other Muslim groups, some extremely small but with a known radical bent, and sought to quickly make their displeasure known.47
Hlayhel, perhaps the most aggressive participant, while insisting that he made no threats, also warned, “When you see what happened in Holland and then still print the cartoons, that’s quite stupid” (presumably referring to the murder of Theo van Gogh). A petition to the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, circulated by the imams, received 17,000 signatures, even though other Danish Muslims voiced disapproval of the committee’s activities.48 A crowd of 3,000 showed up for a rally in Copenhagen on October 14.49 By October, Jyllands-Posten had been forced to hire a security guard in response to numerous phone and e-mail threats against cartoonists, journalists, and editors. Nonetheless, while maintaining a respectful tone, Jyllands-Posten editor-in-chief Carsten Juste refused to apologize.50
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