February 25, 2006...10:44 am
Freedom of Speech, Salman Rushdie, and Julian Barnes
The issue of freedom of speech has featured a lot in the news recently. There was the issue of those cartoons, and the protests it caused, as well as the imprisonment of David Irving in Austria after being found guilty of holocaust denial. In Turkey, there was the trial - thankfully dropped - of writer Orhan Pamuk, who was accused of defaming the nation over the issue of the Arminian genocide. In today’s Guardian, there is an interesting article that asks the question: Is free speech an illusion? Definately a hot topic then, especially for anyone interested in committing their thoughts to paper, broadcast, or blog.
By coincidence I happened to be reading ‘Letters from London’ by Julian Barnes this week. It is a collection of articles he wrote for the New Yorker magazine between 1990 and 1995, and covers a variety of topics from the fall of Margaret Thatcher (from power, not out of the window - sadly), the Chess World Championship between Nigel Short and Gary Kasparov (remember that?), and the financial debacle that was the Lloyds affair.
Back to the free speech issue. One of the articles in ‘Letters from London’ is titled ‘Five Years of the Fatwa’, originally published in February 1994, which tells the story of the first half a decade Salman Rushdie had to live under the threat of death for what he had written in ‘The Satanic Verses’. To refresh musty memories, Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini, with a million-dollar bounty placed on his head. Some Muslims in England took to the streets threatening death, and Rushdie had to live with Special Branch protection in a series of safe houses. In 1998 the Iranian Government declared that they would no longer carry out the death sentence(!), and Rushdie stopped living in hiding, although the fatwa has since been re-affirmed by a number of Islamic leaders, including the spiritual leader of Iran - the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - in 2005.
Barnes tells the story of, a shocking lack of public support from the British government for a citizen who had been sentenced to death by another country for something that he had written in a book; the fact that British Airways banned Rushdie from flying on any of their planes; and that many of his fellow writers refused to support him.
Possibly the most interesting part of the article, written twelve years ago and re-read now, comes near the end. Barnes adds to the Rushdie case with the examples of a number of other writers and dissidents that had fallen foul of the fatwa; Bangladeshi poet Taslima Nasreen, Indian actress Shabana Azmi, and the death of seventeen writers in Algeria. Barnes questions why there has been a sudden increase in the number of writers getting themselves into bother with the fundamentalists…
“What is it that suddenly, worldwide, makes Iranian dissidents, anti-fundamentalists, novelists and journalists of various ideological stripes decide that they simply must throw themselves upon the enemy’s sword? Or could it be the sword is moving?”
If you ever see a copy of ‘Letters from London’ second hand or on offer somewhere then you should definately take a look. It is not all as serious as the article on the Rushdie affair, but it makes for highly entertaining reading on the Great Britain of the early 1990s, beginning with Thatcher in power and ending with Tony Blair’s rise to the leadership of the Labour Party. A fascinating look back and, as you would expect from Julian Barnes, supremely well written.
On the Atari DJ Tapedeck: ‘London Calling’, The Clash.
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