In February 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, called for the death of Salman Rushdie over what Khomeini perceived to be blasphemy in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. Some large bookstore chains pulled the novel from their shelves. A local bookstore owner in Riverdale, N.Y., though fearful, decided to stock it.
Looking for an editorial for The Riverdale Press, a 14,000-circulation Bronx weekly that had been founded by his father, Co-Publisher and Editor Bernard L. Stein interviewed the bookstore owner. He had not read The Satanic Verses, but his editorial supported the right of Americans to do so. He considered this “an apple pie and motherhood” editorial. He was simply defending free expression.
Five days after the editorial appeared, the Riverdale Press office was firebombed. Although no arrest was ever made, the FBI concluded that the Rushdie editorial had motivated the bombers.
The fire melted the newspaper office’s phones and computers and destroyed notebooks, files — everything. It was a Tuesday, deadline day for the weekly. Stein moved the editing operation to the paper’s offsite production facility. The staff produce the paper on time with the only front-page editorial Stein ever published. The headline read: “We shall not be silenced.”
And he wasn’t.
Nine years later, in 1998, Stein won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Among the 10 editorials in was one in which he decried the lack of community outrage over an incident in which a white man claiming to be a police officer held a black man at gunpoint.
“In our homes and schools,” he wrote, “we need to tell his story to our children so that they’ll understand that racism is not a phenomenon of America's past but a present threat to our own lives. The thugs who assaulted this young man insulted all of us. They assumed we would applaud what they did, or at least regard it with indifference. Don't let our silence prove them right.”
The prize-winning package also included Stein’s annual editorial about Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses. In it he took up a theme similar to the one he had expressed about the persistence of racism: the damage done by public complacency. The editorial was published on Feb. 27, 1997.Why Rushdie matters
“I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.”
– Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, February 1989
In The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini is portrayed as the enemy of time. “We will make a revolution,” he proclaims, “against history ... the intoxicant, the creation of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies — progress, science, rights.” His disciple – a satiric rendering of rock singer Cat Stevens — sings, “Burn the books and trust the Book; shred the papers and hear the Word.”
Salman Rushdie has learned a great deal in the eight years since the Ayatollah’s decree made him a marked man, but he had already understood why the right to speak freely is democracy’s most fundamental right, the cornerstone of our freedom. He already understood that words and the ideas they convey offer us the possibility of change, and that without that possibility, self-government is a meaningless concept.
“In totalitarian societies,” said Rushdie in one of his guerrilla speeches where he emerges briefly from hiding and as quickly disappears again, “there is always an attempt to replace the many truths of freedom by the one truth of power, be it secular or religious power. Totalitarian regimes seek to halt the motion of society.”
That is why what happens to Rushdie should matter to all of us, why his fate transcends the issue of his personality, his religion or his literary merit, all of which have been invoked to his discredit. Whether Salman Rushdie can go to the corner newsstand for a paper, book a table in his own name at a restaurant or announce a speaking engagement in advance is a measure not only of his freedom but of ours. It will tell us whether we can really read what we please, whether we can grapple with ideas as we wish, whether we can be changed and make change.So it is a pity that the anniversary of the Ayatollah’s death sentence passed so quietly this year. The author published an op-ed piece on his plight in The Times; CNN took notice of his existence; but the storm of articles and appeals that characterized years past dwindled to a drizzle.
It would be comforting to think that the author no longer needs defending, that the fact that eight years have passed, that the Ayatollah is dead and that Rushdie has grown bolder shows the danger has passed. But a bounty of millions remains on the novelist's head and he continues to live underground.
Moreover only eight years ago this nation's largest bookstore chains withdrew the book from their shelves in the face of threats. More recently, Penguin refused to publish a paperback edition, leaving the task to an underground consortium out of fear of reprisals. What that says about the state of our own freedom is not comforting.
“How fragile civilization is; how easily, how merrily a book burns!” wrote Salman Rushdie as he watched Moslem demonstrators in York consign The Satanic Verses to the flames. The need to defend our fragile civilization remains undiminished. The ashes are not yet cold.