Foretelling Rushdie

Many column inches have been expended this week on the second and inevitable part of the Salman Rushdie Affair. 

Expect more in the days to come as professors, politicians and pundits wade in.

Despite Iran officially rescinding its support for the fatwa imposed on the author by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the blasphemy — which writer Kenan Malik noted in 2019 was “undeniably critical and insulting” — remains.

That, in turn, leads to the inevitability that Rushdie — who after a decade in hiding likely believed that the threat had, if not evaporated, then at least diminished — would some day cross paths with someone like Hadi Matar.

By the time the fatwa was issued, The Satanic Verses had already been burnt in such places as Bolton, UK, but the edict lit a global fire that resulted in deaths worldwide, including of the book’s Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi.

Burning books in protest is as old as books themselves. Next stop: burning them as policy. Take Captain Beatty, the fire chief in novelist Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a novel whose main character, Guy Montag, is a disillusioned fireman whose job is not to put out fires but to start them — with books. 

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door,” says Beatty. “Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”

Bradbury’s novel, partly inspired by Nazi book burnings, was banned in apartheid SA as well as by Florida’s Bay County school board for its “vulgarity”, so he knew a thing or two about intolerance.

Perhaps when he wrote the character Granger, leader of a group of intellectuals who commit books to memory, he was predicting a time like ours in which intolerance has transcended age, race, religion and nationality, where its angry foot soldiers do such things as petrol-bomb abortion clinics and murder trans people.

“Come on now,” says Granger, “we’re going to go build a mirror factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”