euro|topics - Salman Rushdie at the heart of a new controversy

Main focus of Friday, June 22, 2007

Salman Rushdie at the heart of a new controversy

Writer Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding under threat of death after an Iranian fatwa in 1989, was recently knighted by the Queen. This decision has provoked the ire of Muslim extremists who view the knighting of the author of 'The Satanic Verses' as a provocation. The European press analyses the affair.

La Libre Belgique - Belgium

"To distinguish a formerly controversial writer is one thing. To not have seen that such an action would risk causing a stir in Islamic extremist circles is quite another", noted editorialist Gérald Papy. "Nearly twenty years after the publication of 'The Satanic Verses', nearly ten years after the scrapping of the deadly fatwa, the honour bestowed on Salman Rushdie shouldn't be making more waves. But liberty, tolerance and openness towards others, which are defended by democratic and must never be abandoned, are values which have little resonance - less and less, we are tempted to write - in certain Muslim countries. These states made sick by their extremists in the sense that their leaders are often tempted to compromise, in one way or another, with them". (22/06/2007)

The Independent - United Kingdom

Dominic Lawson considers Salman Rushdie's recent knighthood in the light of some of its more infamous recipients, like Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe. Rushdie's title isn't as disgraceful as some make out. "Only two years ago Iqbal Sacranie, the former chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, was awarded a knighthood. This is the same Iqbal Sacranie who, when the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on Rushdie, announced that 'death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him'. There were, shamefully, no expressions of outrage when the contemptible Mr Sacranie was made 'Sir Iqbal'. On Tuesday night I attended Salman Rushdie's 60th birthday party. There were a number of congratulatory speeches - but while all mentioned his age, none referred to his knighthood. Perhaps that is not so surprising. For a man who had been sentenced to death in the name of an entire religion, to have reached the age of 60 at all is a much greater achievement than any bauble." (22/06/2007)

Der Standard - Austria

18 years after the word 'fatwa' was adopted into the West's vocabulary, Salman Rushdie can still cause a stir, writes Gudrun Harrer. "The Rushdie hysteria took on epidemic proportions, became chronic and, as tends to happen with such diseases, still flares up every now and then. After a partially state-controlled foundation put a bounty on his head Rushdie spent years underground... This was a long time ago. Since he published his Parodia Sacra (which follows Western tradition while in Islamic cultural circles blasphemous or un-Islamic content generally takes the form of lyrics) Rushdie has written countless other novels, but the Islamic world is still obsessed with the 'Satanic Verses'." (22/06/2007)

El País - Spain

The Spanish daily republishes a column from The Guardian in which Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies at Cambridge, takes issue with Salman Rushdie's political views. "Sir Salman is partly the creation of the fatwa that played its role in strengthening the self-fulfilling 'clash of civilisations' that both Bush and Osama bin Laden find so handy. Driven underground and into despair by zealotry, Rushdie finally emerged blinking into New York sunshine shortly before the towers came tumbling down. Those formidable literary powers would now be deployed not against, but in the service of, an American regime that had declared its own fundamentalist monopoly on the meanings of "freedom" and "liberation". The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such." (22/06/2007)

» To the complete press review of Friday, June 22, 2007

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