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March 6
The Revolutionary Justice Organization, based in Lebanon, announced that it had completed plans to kill Rushdie.
March 9
Britain expelled about thirty Iranians on security grounds because of the death threat to Rushdie. That nation also closed the Iranian consulate in Hong Kong, which is still a British colony.
The United States announced that 30,000 Iranian citizens are in the United States on student visas, with some 10,000 to 15,000 being activists with sympathies for Khomeini's fundamentalist Shiite regime.
March 10
In the Malaysian city of Kota Bahru, an estimated 10,000 Moslems burned United States flags and pictures of The Satanic Verses. The gathering in that nation was organized by the opposition Pan Malaysian Islamic Party. There were no reported disturbances.
March 11
The speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Hojatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani, opined that the furor over the novel could be resolved by burning all existing copies of the book and banning it forever. His statement, made during prayers at Teheran University, was that the solution to
the strangest and rarest crisis in history is to issue a strict order to seize all copies in the entire world and burn them.
If it stays, it will remain forever a source of rebellion and it would be impossible that peace would come between real Moslems and the supporters of this book.
If those who ignited this flame do not find a suitable solution, no one knows where it will lead to.
March 13
The March 13 issue of Newsweek was banned in Malaysia, and the March 9 issue of the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, for printing extracts from the book.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia refused to support Iran's death order against Rushdie. Two Iranian government envoys had been touring Islamic states seeking support for Iran's stance on the Rushdie affair: Ahmad Jannati, who was in Bahrain on March 12, and Mohammad Yazdi, who was in Nigeria.
March 14
Indonesia and Singapore banned the book on this date.
Iran was unable to convince the forty-six-member Organization of Islamic Conferences meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to uphold Khomeini's death sentence. Iran's foreign minister did not attend. But Mohammad Khodadadi, head of the Foreign Ministry's Islamic Organization Affairs representing Iran, said that Rushdie's book would be "the most important issue to be debated by the conference as far as we are concerned. We will address the conference for their support for Iran's views on this score." He failed completely in this task.
March 16
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sent police to protect the United States Embassy during a demonstration; right wing political foes now cast her as a westernized defender of Rushdie. There was a demand for the resignation of Interior Minister Aitzaz Ashan who was accused of ordering the police to suppress the march.
March 17
Fifty thousand Moslems left their mosques and marched through the capital city of Dhaka to the Bangladesh government's headquarters to demand the death of author Salman Rushdie.
March 20
Rioters broke windows and spray-painted buildings in a Moslem neighborhood in Sheffield, England, Media reporters saw windows smashed, small tress pulled up, paint sprayed on cars, homes, and religious centers as well as painted slogans demanding Rushdie be left in peace. There were no reported injuries. "Pecks die" was scrawled on a mosque.
In Israel, Adnan Husseini, director of the Supreme Islamic Council in Jerusalem, said,
Islam is a giant which a small book like this doesn't hurt. We don't care about the book, really. We understand Islam well. We are proud of Mohammed and we believe what this man publishes about Islam is not important.
Murders over The Satanic Verses were not confined to the Third World Countries. Belgium was the scene of two killings. Here the widow of the leader of Belgium's Moslems threatens a journalist shortly after the murders of her husband and an aid on March 29, 1989. |
March 29
Both Imam Abdullah Ahdal, the Saudi leader of Moslems in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, discussed above, and an aide, a librarian at the Center, were shot to death, point blank, twice, once in the head and once in the neck from close range, in the Center in Brussels, on March 29 by three hooded men. Later an Islamic group in Lebanon, Soldiers of Truth, claimed credit for the death. The murderers were never found.
Subsequently, W. H. Smith, Britain's biggest bookseller (430 stores), withdrew the book from the two Bradford outlets.
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April
William Collins Sons (the London-based division of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire) commissioned two women to gather documents in the Rushdie affair, but just weeks later, in May, got cold feet and decided not to publish the book in England for Viking. The excuses were endless: the book would not be a commercial success; the book was not objective. Collins simple wanted out anyway it could get out.
April 21
A Church of Christ minister in Pensacola, florida, opined in a long newspaper article that Rushdie was getting exactly what he deserved, and he used chapter and verse of the bible to illustrate that:
King Jesus recognized a principle that Rushdie ... would do well to remember, "Do not judge, or you too will be judged; for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
In another place he said, "He who lives by the sword will die by the sword." Paul chooses this principle by writing, "For whatever a man plants, that is what he will also harvest."
The principle illustrated in all of these sayings is, if you are looking for trouble you will find it. ...
Rushdie was raised around Moslems. He know the teachings of Islam condemned its opponents to death. Rushdie knew when he wrote his book he was shoving his hand into a hornets' nest. A man who does such things should not complain that he is being stung.
He closed his remarks with a referral to Leviticus 24:15:
Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death. The whole community shall stone him.
May 2
The Austrian Students Association had to hold its reading in a tent because professors refused to allow the event to take place on University of Austria grounds.
May 8
Harper & Row (the New York-based division of Rupert Murdoch's publishing empire) signed a contract with Daniel Pipes to publish his book, The Rushdie Affair. The manuscript was accepted on May 31 for publication. on June 23, Harper and Row also discovered that such a book would not be a commercial success. Mr. Pipes will be published in 1990, instead, by the Birch Lane Press in New York.
Meanwhile, the persons who book television shows were complaining that prominent authors would not appear on shows such as "The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour" or "Nightline" to discuss Rushdie or The Satanic Verses.
The bookstore at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, refused to stock the book. When there was an attempt to have faculty members draw up a petition calling for a boycott of the store, a good number of professors refused to sign, being fearful of becoming targets for fundamentalist Moslems.
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What does [The Satanic Verses] dissent from? Certainly not from people’s right to have faith, though I have none. It dissents most clearly from imposed orthodoxies of all types, from the view that the world is quite clearly This and not That. It dissents from the end of debate.
--Salman Rushdie
Essay in Newsweek
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May 11
President Ali Khomeini said that Iran still demanded the execution of Rushdie:
The decision made about Salman Rushdie is still valid. As I have already said, this is a bullet for which there is a target. It has been shot. It will one day sooner or later hit the target.
Even the official Soviet news agency, Tass, defended the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It said that, as Iran's spiritual leader, he "had no choice" but to impose a death sentence on Rushdie.
But perhaps Imam Khomeini, the supreme religious authority in Iran, had no choice proceeding from Koran teachings other than denouncing a man who has insulted Islam. The denunciation was nothing more, by the way, than the position of a religious leader. The Iranian government has not condemned Rushdie to death.
Tass, however, did not make any statement until the U.S. State Department criticized the Soviet government's silence on the issue, saying, "It is high time the Soviets speak up." Actually this was a case of the kettle calling the pot black. The state department also asked Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevaradnadze to raise the issue in his talks with Iranian officials the weekend of February 25/26. Britain also pressed him to ask Khomeini to give a reprieve to Rushdie. But subsequently the Islamic Republic News Agency said that "there was no mention of the affair in Shevaradnadze's speech."
The Soviet Union's ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin, stated that the furor over Rushdie's novel was extremely dangerous and depended for a solution on respect of everyone's religious feelings.
Yet, as the situation worsened between England and Iran, the Soviet Union suggested it might be willing to mediate.
June 3
Khomeini died June 3, 1989. Immediately Kalim Siddiqi, director of the Moslem Institute in London, issued a statement that:
There is no hope for Rushdie. There's no question of the death sentence being lifted just because the judge who passed sentence has died.
This is not a political issue. This is an Islamic law which Rushdie has broken, and the punishment for this crime is death.
June 17
Nonetheless a second demonstration was held in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England on June 17. At that time young demonstrators broke away from the rally against Rushdie and ran through the main shopping district assaulting people and damaging cars and shops. Police reported forty-four arrests.
Police officers hold back a crowd of several thousand Moslems chanting slogans and protesting The Satanic Verses during a demonstration in Hyde Park on January 18, 1989.
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June 18
The British newspaper Mail printed what it described as Rushdie's first interview after being forced into hiding by death threats. He spoke bitterly of the Khomeini revolution:
It ate most of the people that supported it. It ate the unions, it ate the women's groups, it ate the socialists and left behind only its own bloated members.
June 19
The next day, Ameena Meer, the author of the interview, revealed that it had been conducted on December 24, 1988. She had interviewed Rushdie for the New York-based literary magazine, Bomb, and the article was published in its spring edition, in March. The Bomb sold the article to the Mail, which insisted that it was the "real thing" and had been done in June 1989. Rushdie himself said that the "new interview is wholly false and, in the present situation, highly irresponsible." It was billed as Rushdie's calling the Iranian revolution "a force for evil."
July 12
The Moslem Action Group, of Britain asked a Magistrate Court there to prosecute Rushdie for blaspheming Islam by writing his novel The Satanic Verses, but the court refused on the grounds that the English blasphemy laws only protect Christianity. The Moslems appealed and the High Court Justice permitted them to challenge the ruling at a three-judge panel of the High Court. The barrister for the group announced to the media that if the group should win, it will ask the magistrate to serve the author, in hiding since February 28, with a subpoena.
July 31
The BBC in Great Britain released a production titled "The Blasphemers' Banquet," celebrating renowned blasphemers, but it came close to cancellation because of protests led by the archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie -- protests which mobilized the Moslems of Britain.
August 3
A man accidentally blew himself up in a London hotel while constructing a bomb to attack Rushdie.
August 25
American Booksellers Association announced that it did not want to "insult people." "We respect people of the Islamic faith." but more than 4,000 independent bookstores in the United States carried the book.
September 1989
A bomb exploded on Great Marlborough Street, near a Penguin bookstore in London's West End on September 3.
In York, England, a bomb shattered the window of the Viking Penguin bookstore in the center of the city. It was found before it went off and people were safely evacuated. There were bombs outside Penguin bookstores in three other cities: Guilford, thirty miles southwest of London, in Nottingham in central England, and in Peterborough seventy-five miles north of London. They appeared to be identical to a bomb made from a length of metal pipe filled with explosives which exploded outside a store in central London earlier in September.
October 3
Seventy-two-year-old Ahmed Deedat, a scholar from South Africa, demanded that Moslems read the book. To prove that reading it would convince Westerners to suppress it, he rented the Royal Albert Hall in London, and began to read the book to 6,000 assembled Moslems. He read those parts of the book which took aim at Britain and the West in general to prove that Rushdie was abusing his adopted country.
The Dutch Foreign Minister cancelled a trip to Teheran. British airlines received bomb threats, causing security delays at London's Heathrow Airport.
French President Francois Mitterand condemned the death threat and said:
All dogmatism that through violence undermines freedom of thought and the right to free expression is, in my view, absolute evil. The moral and spiritual progress of humanity is linked to the recoil [from] all fanaticisms.
The hard-core religious stand in the United States was that reflected in Proverbs 30:33:
For as the churning of milk produces butter, and as twisting the nose produces blood, so stirring up anger produces strife.
It was thought that perhaps Rushdie needed to prepare to "reap what one sows."
And how does it all boil down? Salman Rushdie wrote a somewhat senseless book, acknowledged by all to be a fantasy, in which he made swipes at the religion of Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini, knowing a good red herring when he saw one, seized upon the issue of the book to create a phantom enemy, of which all the great decadent religions are in need -- and he would destroy the world with it.
October 10
The Frankfurt Book Fair is traditionally and historically the largest and the best in the world. One would have thought that the issue of Rushdie would be raised there -- and it was on October 10, the day preceding its opening. The director of the fair, Peter Weidhass, in a press conference, called on Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani to revoke the call for death on Salman Rushdie. Saying that he was speaking "in the name of the worldwide community of publishers assembled here," he ruled that Iran could not participate in the fair "as long as this murder threat has not been withdrawn."
Iran was, however, staying with the June statement of the Iranian president that "there is no one in Iran who would want to or could take back that prescription."
Generally, the book fair is opened with pleasantries, but this time the director spoke darkly that "it would appear that the tide of anti-progressive thought is rising all over the world."
There has been a call for murder, a call for murder which is directed against the most fundamental interests of people who make up this fair.
The curse of this murder threat was also extended to cover the publishers of this book and the booksellers offering it for sale.
He then apologized for the presence of increased security measures at the fair, which expected 200,000 visitors. However, both Viking Penguin of Great Britain and Penguin of the United States announced on the same day that the book would not be in their display stands at the fair.
Boersenverein, the trade group of all (about 100) West German (and some Austrian and Swiss) bookstores and publishers, announced on the same day that it had decided "to postpone publication ... in light of a variety of threats that the publishers had received in past months." Publishing by the group, it was decided, would help to discourage any retaliations against any single member.
Weidhass actually made his statement into a speech:
The hatred we have seen in this case, the aggression against an author, his publishers and booksellers, reveal to my eyes a basic, underlying phenomenon -- a problem between the industrialized world and the out-stripped world of the so-called "developing countries." It is the modern age's historic burden of guilt.
The Islamic Republic is an expression of defense against the cultural engulfment of the Islamic world by the culture of the modern age. It reflects the failure of a thoughtless policy of modernization in the "underdeveloped" countries.
The book fair is in fact a dialogue of the First World with itself: More than 80% of the world's entire book trading is actually carried out by only a dozen of the over ninety countries represented at the Frankfurt fair.
The historic horizon of the modern age must be the successful synthesis of the world's cultures. This calls for the combination of cultural forces, not threats of murder. It calls for the expansion of cultural dialogue, not fundamentalist separatism.
January 1990
From this October incident forward, little or nothing was heard of either The Satanic Verses or Salman Rushdie until January 1990. At that time Mugram al-Ghamdi, chairman of the United Kingdom Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, called for a five-day demonstrations, outside the offices of the publishers. Moslems from all of the Moslem communities across Britain took turns during the picketing. Leaflets handed out were captioned, "No Rushdie Porn," "Put Honor Back on the Agenda," and "Hypocrisy in High Places." Al-Ghamdi, explaining why the picketing was called, said,
Since the sensationalism has receded, what remains is a genuine and permanent bitterness in the hearts and minds of ordinary Moslems.
Penguin publishers were meantime keeping a twenty-four-hour duty police officer and three security guards at its entrance hall which is equipped with a metal detector.
Naturally the British Guardian newspaper got to Rushdie about the picketing and he replied, "I am not the enemy of my own people," apparently referring to Moslems.
I think if some of the people who protested about the book took the trouble to read it, they would see that it is not unsympathetic to them.
The Knight-News-Tribune chain, affiliated with the Philadelphia Inquirer, then had its London correspondent attempt a follow-up story. Her report was that Rushdie was growing increasingly paranoid, alternating "between self-pity and rushes of angry egotism" as he remains under twenty-four-hour-a-day police guard. In 1989, that guard cost the British taxpayers almost $800,000. Viking Penguin books also is said to have spent $6 million on security to protect its stores and employees. In Britain alone Penguin received 5,000 threatening letters and twenty-five bomb warnings. Five incendiary devices were discovered in its shops. And its executives have moved to other addresses, not published.
Absolutely under siege as Iran continued to demand that all hardbacks be withdrawn from circulation and that the paperback version be abandoned, Penguin was at risk of losing its business in forty-six Moslem countries.
Ishtiaq Ahmend, spokesman for the Bradford, England, council of Mosques, explained that:
We just cannot let go of this issue. It is not just about a writer. It is about whether we can live as a religious community without fear of indignity and abuse.
Meanwhile, Labor Party members of Parliament who rely heavily on Moslem votes, were urging the banning of the paperback publication on the basis of "the deep offense" it would cause to Moslem sensibilities.
By January 29, Viking Penguin announced that there would be no paperback edition of The Satanic Verses. The announcement stated that the publishers would not produce the paperback "as long as there was any risk to its staff, its book shops, or the public." Reports then indicated that Rushdie was charging that Penguin had a contractual obligation to publish the paperback edition and was pushing for it. His wife, Marianne Wiggins, who lives apart from him, added that they were not planning a divorce and that Rushdie would have some financial problems if the paperback was not published. Meanwhile, she was successfully making a publicity tour for her own Penguin paperback publication, John Dollar. Naturally, the Chicago Tribune would take the opportunity to take a swat at her also, and in short punchy terms:
Wiggins, like her husband, is forty-two, and has let a calamitous life: a kidney removal at nine, marriage at seventeen, divorce and single parenthood at twenty-two, her father's suicide in her twenties, cancer of the colon in her thirties, and now this.
Later Penguin backed off its original statement somewhat, indicated that sometime, somewhen, in the future, there could possibly be a paperback edition. Rushdie himself is insisting that the paperback edition be issued; Iran and the Moslems insist that the hardback be withdrawn from sale and from libraries and that no paperback be issued. Penguin has asked Rushdie to forego the paperback edition and he has refused. Non-publishing, he states, would be suppression, "banned by the back door." But many critics see Rushdie only as "an unrepentant multimillionaire who is still greedy for more [money]."
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Even if I were to concede (and I do not concede it) that what I did in The Satanic Verses was the literary equivalent of flaunting oneself shamelessly before the eyes of aroused men, is that really a justification for being, so to speak, gang-banged?
--Salman Rushdie
Essay in Newsweek
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February 4
Rushdie prepared a lecture to be delivered by Harold Pinter, a playwright friend, on February 7 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, on the theme, "Is Nothing Sacred?" This was preceded by a 7,000-word essay published in a London newspaper, The Independent, on February 4. The Independent also put out an interview of Rushdie. The essay was as trivial as the book. Can you imagine this author, condemned without hope of redemption, saying to rabid fundamentalist Moslem nuts that his book:
... celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. I rejoice in mongrelization and fear the absolutism of the Pure.
He then asks the Moslems for "a moment of good will, a moment in which we may all accept that the other parties are acting, have acted, in good faith."
Nonetheless, Newsweek purchased the essay and published it in its February 12, 1990, issue, along with its own personal interview with Rushdie.
During his interview, Rushdie told The Independent that he has been reading Enlightenment authors such as Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire and that he saw himself in their company:
It's very odd when you think of how much has been written about them as the bedrock of European free speech, to see what actually happened to those guys in their lifetimes. They were banned, persecuted, reviled, and accused of blasphemy.
How nice. He noticed.
February 7
Apparently Rushdie wanted to deliver the lecture/essay himself, but Scotland Yard dissuaded him from it, and Harold Pinter went ahead with the audience of 200. Police guarded the building and security guards searched handbags and screened the audience with metal detectors.
February 9
Rushdie had an immediate reply from Iran when the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei renewed a call for his death: the fatwa (religious decree) "... about the writer of the blasphemous book The Satanic Verses is still valid and must be implemented." Britain imposed a full security alert at military bases and airports immediately in response to the repeated death call against Rushdie. There were continuing reports of a "high level of activity" by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah (Party of God) Islamic extremists group.
February 14, Valentine's Day
This was, of course, the anniversary of the issuance of the death order by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the 366th day in which Rushdie had been in hiding.
The American Penguin office announced that it now had 30,000 abusive letters related to the book. But it also confirmed that it had sold one million English-language copies (740,000 in the United States and 220,000 in Britain) plus thousands more in fifteen other languages. That totals up to a cool $20 million in sales, in just seventeen months. Penguin estimates that its profit on the book has been $3.4 million -- which is a fairly unlikely story.
Meantime, the Moslems fume. Freedom of speech in the West, they point out, is constrained by blasphemy laws, and by the laws of libel and slander. Moslems point out that their religion forbids blasphemy, and requires that each Moslem defend his faith.
What now?
But all of this was simply a harbinger of actions to come.
When all is said and done
Well, that then is another tip of the submerged mire under the thin top on which modern culture floats. Everyone is talking about the last decade of the twentieth century, and all that rot. But at any time the religious can have us again -- not alone Atheists, but the entire culture. We are going down the corridor of time carrying with us ideas which should have been shed 10,000 years ago. We are encumbered with irrationality, burdened with hatreds, entrenched in the muck of religious trivia. And despite the opportunity that reaches out -- humankind is not going to go anywhere but back again to medievalism, locked in tight with the new technology and beyond any hope.
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February 23
