Lights Out: Islam, Free Speech And The Twilight of the West by Mark Steyn

Author:Mark Steyn
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Stockade Books
Published: 2014-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

ISLAM AND FREE EXPRESSION

Death is too easy

The New York Sun, June 24th 2007

A YEAR OR SO after the Ayatollah Khomeini took out an Islamist mob contract on Salman Rushdie, the novelist appeared, after elaborate security arrangements, on a television arts show in London. His host was Melvyn Bragg, a long-time British telly grandee, and what was striking was how quickly the interview settled down into the usual lit.crit. chit-chat. Lord Bragg took Rushdie back to his earlier pre-fatwa work. “After your first book,” drawled Bragg, “which was not particularly well-received…”

That’s supposed to be the worst a novelist has to endure. His book will be “not particularly well-received” – ie, some twerp reviewers will be snotty about it in The New Yorker and The Guardian. In the cosy world of English letters, it came as a surprise to find that being “not particularly well-received” meant foreign governments putting a bounty on your head and killing your publishers and translators. Even then, the literary set had difficulty taking it literally. After news footage of British Muslims burning Rushdie’s book in the streets of English cities, BBC arts bores sat around on talk-show sofas deploring the “symbolism” of this attack on “ideas”.

There was nothing symbolic about it. They burned the book because they couldn’t burn Rushdie himself. If his wife and kid had swung by, they’d have gladly burned them, just as the mob was happy to burn to death 37 Turks who’d made the mistake of being in the same hotel in Sivas as one of the novelist’s translators. When British Muslims called for Rushdie to be killed, they meant it. From a mosque in Yorkshire, Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to The Independent to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5 verses 33-34 from the Koran:

The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land.

That last apparently wasn’t an option.

Britain got so many things wrong during the Rushdie affair, just as America got so many things wrong during the Iranian embassy siege ten years earlier. But it’s now 2007 – almost two decades after Iran claimed sovereignty over British subjects, almost three decades after they claimed sovereignty over US territory. So what have we learned? I was with various British parliamentarians the other day, and we were talking about the scenes from Islamabad, where the usual death-to-the-Great-Satan chappies had burned an effigy of the Queen to protest the knighthood she’d just conferred on Rushdie. I told my London friends that I had to hand it to Tony Blair’s advisors: What easier way for the toothless old British lion, after the humiliations inflicted upon the Royal Navy sailors by their Iranian kidnappers, to show you’re still a player than by knighting Salman Rushdie for his “services to literature”? Given that his principal service to literature has been to introduce the word

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