Salman Rushdie’s attacker was fighting an ancient war. So are those calling it a ‘free speech’ crisis

“The attack on Salman Rushdie on-stage in New York is deeply shocking and sadly not surprising,” Douglas Murray, the last neocon, writes in The Spectator, winning the gold medal for getting out a Rushdie take only a few hours after the event. Murray’s judgment is a typical half-truth. Shocking the attack was, but surprising too.

The attacker came not merely out of the crowd but out of the early 2000s, the last time that violent Islamism seemed like a global, all-encompassing threat. The Iranian government had backed off support of the fatwa issued against Rushdie by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, saying it would “neither help nor hinder” anyone trying to pursue it — a declaration given as part of a deal restoring diplomatic relations with the UK. But the fatwa remained in place, was renewed by Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader, and its cash value was increased by private donors. 

The surprising thing was that there hadn’t been more attempts — any attempts we’ve heard of — in the interim, as Rushdie dispensed with security. The surprising thing was that it has happened again now. 

Who knows what we’ll find out about Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old New Jersey resident detained for the attack? Perhaps there’s a whole team behind him, perhaps he’s getting instructions from afar — but more likely he’s an example of that increasingly significant American historical force: a screwed-up young man with an obsession and a weapon.

Quite possibly, the record will show that he has been attached to a radical Shiite idea for some time, but that it has no context, is part of no movement. Iran has long since turned its attention to regional jockeying with Turkey, Russia and Saudi Arabia now that the US has departed. Sunni Muslims are facing a messy civil war stalemate in Syria and a slow coming apart in Iraq. Radical Sunni movement al-Qaeda is a shadow of itself; ISIS is broken up.

There has been no large-scale terrorist attack in the West for a decade. As the axis of conflict wheels round to the East-West division, violent Islamism becomes visible for what it was and is: a tail-end movement, hoping to set in place modern movements — Wahhabism, political-messianic Shiism — that purported to be ancient through the ultra-modern means of unlimited terror. Maybe it will regroup to regional effect, but the glory days of setting the world on fire are over. The bizarre retro attack on Rushdie is simply one among a number of hot fragments flying off the end of a concluded era. 

Various groups might claim some glory from this, but they will be nothing compared to the desperate and jaded political warriors of the right and the pro-war left to try and rally some, or any, sort.

“The ayatollahs have found their accomplices in western liberals” (Matthew Syed, The Times); “The attack on Salman Rushdie highlights a growing cancer” (Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph). Andrew Bolt goes through the hits and memories: the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered 30 years ago; filmmaker Theo Van Gogh assassinated 17 years ago. The Age, in a return to the Gawenda years, found UK ultra-zionist Stephen Pollard to argue Israel’s position on Iran. The Guardian published the “Index on Censorship” and Jo Glanville’s piece “We internalised the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This is what follows“. The Australian’s Caroline Overington intoned “This can’t be Rushdie’s last word“. And finally, Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill — who might once have pointed out the pseudo-political uses to which this is being put — channelled the group’s current Leninist Colonel Blimp stance in The Spectator with “This attack is a vile affront to liberty and to the principles of an open society“.

It really was a hell of a reunion for the old crowd. The line seemed to be that our current state of hyper-censoriousness had its roots in that fatwa all those decades ago — as well as the failure of the Thatcher government to give a full-throated defence of free speech and free thought, as it worked out how to deal with a volatile Muslim population acting in unity for the first time. 

Who are these people kidding? The Satanic Verses fatwa was a fight over a highbrow novel, which inserted a retelling of the Prophet Muhammad’s life story into a fantastically complex magical realist story set in the present — and played with a myth of “satanic verses”, which Satan fooled Muhammad into putting in the Koran (before he later removed them). Few people read it when it came out; its Muslim critics proudly said they hadn’t and would trust the ayatollah’s judgment on this.

The conflict was between high modernist culture, with its absolute value of free thought, and a community whose leaders said that some things were beyond free speech, and that their position was, by virtue of their lives and decades there, an equally valid one. But the conflict could only occur because the mission of high culture was taken seriously by the government, and by substantial numbers of people in UK society. In this rarefied fight, the fatwa nostalgics say, were the roots of our current self-censorship put down.

A moment’s examination of the actual history will refute this. The Satanic Verses controversy wasn’t the start of anything; it was the end of it. It was the last challenging highbrow novel in the great sequence stretching back through modernism, and the only one that concerned the particular nature of first world-third world community relations as created by the global shifts of a multicultural planet. The book was singular, a satire on growing fundamentalism within global Islam.

The fatwa crowd likes to present the attacks on the novel as having a chilling effect. In fact, satire is a rare genre these days, doubly so when combined with global affairs. There wasn’t much before The Satanic Verses in that vein (the travelogues of VS Naipaul excoriating Islam as a failed and neurotic civilisation come close), and there hasn’t been much after. Did the violent attacks on those associated with the book cause prudence shading into cowardice in publishing? Yes, but only there. In cinema, Muslim fanatics became the go-to fanatical bad guys, producers deploying one gleefully racist depiction after another without pause.

Indeed, in the 1990s, popular culture, far from catching a chilling effect from this high-culture stoush, went into its last period to date of freewheeling offence, with stand-ups like Andrew Dice Clay, Eddie Murphy and the UK comic Jerry Sadowitz (“Nelson Mandela, what a cunt. Lend him 50 quid, you don’t see him for 27 years”) putting out racist, misogynist and homophobic comedy, rap music becoming a festival of homicidal misogyny, and sitcoms revelling in cheap jokes on every stereotype imaginable — much of this material becoming a target of cultural revision in the present. 

The highbrow novel wasn’t silenced; it’s simply that through the cultural changes that occurred, such novels lost the magisterial power they once enjoyed. In 1995, for example, William H Gass published The Tunnel, a complex novel designed to draw the reader into the worldview and world-understanding of a character you come to understand is an actual Nazi. The novel is about what novels do, a meta-reflection, using that extreme subject to make the process inescapable. Gass and others worried that a mid-level audience might take the book literally. They needn’t have. It won the National Book Award, and no one gave a damn. As high culture lost its centrality, so too did what it did, which is long thematic argument about the world rendered as narrative.

Tracing the current hyper-censoriousness back to The Satanic Verses is thus a false genealogy. What happened instead is that an iconoclastic mass culture (though nothing like the revolutionary mass culture of the ’60s and ’70s) suddenly ran into the social structural changes created by various occurrences: the decentring of white centrality in Western societies; increased tertiary education; the rise of self-assembling and surveilling networks of the social media-smartphone nexus.

It was not ideas that were questionable or offensive, but representations, words and speaking positions. The fatwa re-enactment society believes that the wobbly position on free thought by the actions of a few novelists, critics, and grandees of the time created our current restricted culture. Ha. They wish high culture had that power. The upcoming Melbourne Writers Festival will be enjoyable for many, but the only chance of a participant being injured is if two of them bore each other to death in the one-on-one sessions; the only “dangerous” idea at the upcoming Festival of Dangerous Ideas is that anything said will challenge an audience coming to be affirmed.

Instead, selfhood and social structure changed very rapidly, notions of harm became individual and intersectional, words acquired a material weighting beyond expression and were assessed by their traumatic impact, and though a bit of diluted Marcuse and some bell hooks went into it, it mainly arose from the machinery itself, which conferred a material reality on identities that were hitherto only aspects of subjective or collective being.

The same day Salman Rushdie was attacked, ’90s comedian Jerry Sadowitz had the whole run of his comeback show at the Edinburgh Festival cancelled because audience members had been offended by the racism and sexism he deployed as part of the act. Instead of telling such people to read the effing program before they buy a ticket, the producing venue, the Pleasance, cancelled the show because the material “did not align with our values”.

It wasn’t, as per the Satanic Verses critics, offended on behalf of some massed minority elsewhere; the very conjuring of such wounded their own sense of self, and of propriety. This trumped the wider value — pretty essential to comedy you would have thought — of supporting risk, danger and speech in other contexts abhorrent. It is these petty but more embedded challenges to a pluralist society that need challenging, as I’ve indicated in a couple of recent articles, but which don’t provide any simple “hero” narrative. 

It is indicative that the culture has chosen security, integration and safety over the primacy of beliefs, argument and the notion of an intellectual imperative. The Satanic Verses didn’t do that; instead the fatwa is a moment in the civilisation that preceded this era, as distantly intellectual as Edward VIII’s abdication crisis or the Anglo-Catholic controversy.

Salman Rushdie, cruising out his senior years on the talk circuit, decades after being an actual novelist, wasn’t a victim of the attack on free thought; simply of the swirling psychosis becoming an ever-larger part of American public culture. The rightists and centrists taking this morbidly absurd event to rally around are so desperately in need of a clear and present danger that they may require the revival of the broken-backed old camel of violent Islamism, in order to have something to play with.

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