Hay Festival 2012: Salman Rushdie on security and The Satanic Verses

Sunday Telegraph (UK) ^ | 7:44PM BST 03 Jun 2012 | Anita Singh

[Olog-hai]

Salman Rushdie can joke these days about the fatwa that put him into hiding for nigh on a decade.

“It wasn’t the first time they didn’t like what I’d written; just the first time they’d tried to kill me. But I wasn’t writing for the mullahs. I didn’t think they were my target audience,” he quipped at the Telegraph Hay Festival. “The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini.”

The author was keen to stress that a lot of people rather liked The Satanic Verses. …

Rushdie’s “blasphemous” depiction of the prophet Muhammad prompted book-burning in Britain and riots around the world when the book was published in 1988. In February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his execution.

The author lived under the protection of the British security services for many years, but in a second talk at Hay, he criticized governments for stripping citizens’ liberty in exchange for the promise of increased security.

“The balance between liberty and security seems to be very imbalanced,” he said. … “In America, but not only in America, we have this extraordinary situation where a broadly progressive, liberal President has signed into law a provision that allows people to be held indefinitely without charge. This is an extreme infringement of all our rights, and yet there it is.”

But he conceded: “Unlike some, I do believe there actually is a really hostile enemy; there are people who, if they were not restrained, would try to do harm to Western democracies. There is no doubt there are people who have such intentions. The question always is how to evaluate what the response should be.” …

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Olog-hai.

"The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini."