WHY SHOULD WE DO WHAT GOD SAYS?

Reflections on a Fatwa.

Demonstrators burned copies of Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” in 1989 in front of Bradford City Hall in the United Kingdom. Credit... Asadour Guzelian/Shutterstock

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Below is an essay I wrote about the fatwa on its thirtieth anniversary last year. The topic of free speech has perhaps never been so contested or fought over as it is today, particularly by the right, who are mostly humourless. For us on the left, free speech is characterised by our satire, criticism, and scabrous story-telling, as I say below.

I hope you enjoy it.

Hanif xx

It was the early months of 1989, and they were becoming strange days indeed. It's not often you see two policemen on their knees looking under your bed, glancing into your wardrobe and dragging aside your shower curtain to make sure there’s no terrorist waiting to spring out and strangle a novelist who’s popped round for a drink. But in the north of England bearded Pakistanis were buying books in their local Waterstones before setting fire to them; and a foreign government had just pronounced a ‘fatwa’ - whatever that was - on a writer for a wild piece of post-modern prose concerning migration, the breakdown of belief, multiple subjectivities and the chaos and derangement of capitalistic acceleration. 

As if that wasn't enough: with the cops sniffing around, you couldn’t even smoke a joint in your own living room. Luckily Salman assured me that the policeman wouldn’t leap up and handcuff me since he really had no sense of smell, even as he tucked into a large plate of your girlfriend’s lasagna.