THE WORLD THE FATWA MADE:
A mysterious feature of the fatwa was the way it brought out apologists, appeasers, and peacemakers who misunderstood its motivations. Former President Jimmy Carter blamed Rushdie in The New York Times for “vilifying the Prophet Mohammed and defaming the Holy Koran.” The former president, who had been in office when the ayatollah held American citizens captive, blindfolded and abused for 444 days, did not seem to recognize the nature of the trap he was falling into. “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important,” Carter wrote, he nevertheless agreed the work of fiction was a “direct insult” to Muslims whose sacred beliefs had been “violated.”
Those like Carter, who approached the fatwa with rational expectations, wound up saying irrational things, ratifying its terms even if they quarreled with them. Blaming Rushdie’s novel for inflicting “the kind of intercultural wound that is difficult to heal,” as though the author had assassinated an archduke, Carter chose to see the fatwa as a mirror of offended religious sentiment, even though it was a license to commit transnational murder issued by a cleric who had named a street after Anwar Sadat’s assassin.
Carter’s hope that “tactful public statements and private discussions could still defuse this explosive situation” was like waiting for a hostage to be released. He failed to understand that the fatwa’s rejection of borders, laws, national sovereignty, and individual autonomy was the whole point. Or that a decree that made the victim the aggressor, murder a virtue, and suicide a sacrament did not permit common ground.
The message Carter failed to understand was received loud and clear by a 24-year-old American named Hadi Matar.
Thirty-three years after Rushdie was sentenced to death, Matar traveled from Fairview, New Jersey, to Chautauqua, New York, where he attacked Rushdie with a knife from behind as he sat onstage at the Chautauqua Institution waiting to give a speech about free expression and the importance of keeping writers safe. Matar, who told a reporter that he had only read “a page or two” of The Satanic Verses but knew it was an “attack on Islam,” stabbed the 75-year-old writer in the face, the eye, the neck, and the midsection, 15 times before being tackled by bystanders.
That was the logic of the fatwa. Khomeini hadn’t read The Satanic Verses either but had revoked its creator’s right to exist anyway. This helps explain how Matar, who was found guilty of attempted murder last year, could tell the court before his sentencing: “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people. He wants to be a bully; he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
You don’t need magic to turn a writer into a monster; the sleep of reason will do, and the overriding presence of conspiracy theories that do the thinking for you, and turn whole categories of humanity into stock villains in a long-running play.
On Thursday, Erik Florack described Carter as “The Father of the Islamic Revolution.” A decade later, he was quite happy to keep stoking it along.
