Doubtless many of you will have read about the vicious attack on author Salman Rushdie over the weekend.
As we know, it is believed the stabbing was carried out to fulfill the 33 year old ‘fatwa’ or Islamic execution order that was pronounced on him because of the contents of his book, The Satanic Verses.
This morning on RTE Radio1 Irish Times journalist, Fintan O’Toole commented on his certainty that the pronouncement of the fatwa hadn’t much at all to do with The Satanic Verses, and everything to do with power tripping by the regime of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, the former leader of Iran who proclaimed it.
Now, 1989 was quite some time before I became interested in geopolitics, but I was in college when Charlie Hebdo happened, so to think that over 30 years after the fact, an assault so vicious that it has reportedly left Rushdie with life changing injuries, was not largely motivated by outrage at the consents of the book seems a little far fetched to me.
However, be that as it may I can’t help but see a very large Streisand effect going on here:
Before I continue let me state for the record that I’ve never been an Islamic cleric before, but hear me out. If the material Rushdie wrote, which is believed by muslims to be based on their prophet, Mohammad, was really so offensive one might presume that they would want to prevent people reading it and thereby limit the possibility of the contents being propagated further.
So maybe, just maybe, creating a scenario where now literally millions of people are talking about the book again, more than 30 years later, was slightly counter productive.
And if poor Salman Rushdie wasn’t a popular enough target, well what about JK Rowling?
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has said she received a death threat after tweeting her concern for the welfare of her fellow author after his brutal stabbing.
She had tweeted saying “Feeling very sick right now. Let him be ok”, to which a twitter account by the name of Meer Asif Aziz responded, “Don’t worry you are next”.
Police probe threat to JK Rowling over Salman Rushdie support https://t.co/E51qzSMHQY
— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) August 14, 2022
Rowling also shared what she says is a response she got from Twitter after reporting the ‘death threat’. It found that “no violations of the Twitter rules in the content you reported”.
.@TwitterSupport any chance of some support? pic.twitter.com/AoeCzmTKaU
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 13, 2022
So now the hoards of Rowling fans, many of whom may be too young to be very interested in what happened to Rushdie, let alone his novels, have been made perhaps painfully aware of them.
Anyway my point is this: I more than likely wouldn’t have read Rushdie’s novels because I’m usually more interested in the fantasy genre: Journalists, (Gript journalists at least) spend hours each day checking, gathering, and researching news, a lot of which is unfortunately not very uplifting, so I usually prefer to escape to Middle Earth in my off time.
However, because of the serious nature of the assault on freedom of speech and expression that the Rushdie attack clearly constitutes, I am now firmly resolved to read his most controversial work.
