JUST days before the man who tried to kill him was sentenced to 25 years in prison, Sir Salman Rushdie withdrew from delivering an address at the California liberal arts institution Claremont McKenna College after student and advocacy groups objected to his presence – citing The Satanic Verses and his alleged ‘Islamophobic’ views.
It was a further sign that de facto blasphemy codes are being reimposed in the West under the banner of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI). The Booker Prize-winning author’s withdrawal came amid mounting criticism from campus activists and external Muslim advocacy organisations, who described the invitation as ‘disrespectful’ and incompatible with the college’s stated values.
Rushdie, a British-American citizen born into a Muslim family in India, has lived under threat since the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel which provoked widespread outrage across parts of the Muslim world. In 1989, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution and offering a $3million bounty — a sentence which explicitly extended to editors, translators, and publishers involved in the book’s production and dissemination.
Over the following years, several of those individuals were violently attacked, some fatally. Among them were William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, shot multiple times outside his home; Ettore Capriolo, Rushdie’s Italian translator, stabbed in the neck, chest, and hands; and Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, left to die in a pool of blood by a lift shaft at Tsukuba University. In 1993, a mob seeking to murder Rushdie’s Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, set fire to the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, killing 37 people. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding and, as recounted in his memoir Joseph Anton, spent much of the 1990s under round-the-clock police protection, living in various safe houses under assumed names.
Despite this long and violent history of attempts to silence him, the invitation to Claremont McKenna on May 17 drew sharp criticism from the Claremont Colleges Muslim Student Association, which issued a public statement on May 2 calling the decision to host Rushdie ‘disrespectful’ and out of line with the values of the institution. The group’s co-president said students had contacted administrators and spoken to media outlets in protest.
In a joint letter, the Muslim Student Association and its supporters argued that hosting Rushdie was incompatible with the college’s obligations under the rubric of EDI. ‘Protecting free speech on campus is vital, but platforming a speaker at a ceremonial event is an endorsement, not an act of open dialogue,’ the letter read.
The Greater Los Angeles Area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also called on the college to ‘address the sincere concerns raised’ by students. ‘Rushdie has made troubling statements about Islam and Palestine,’ the organisation said in a press release. CAIR-LA’s digital communications manager, Enjy El-Kadi, wrote: ‘Rushdie’s writing, especially The Satanic Verses, and his statements conflating Islam with terrorism and extremism in interviews have fuelled Islamophobic narratives and emboldened those who portray Islam as inherently violent.’
The college did not comment publicly on the substance of the protests. In his announcement to students, President Hiram Chodosh insisted that this decision was his alone ‘and completely beyond our control’. He added: ‘We remain steadfast in our commitment to Sir Salman’s visit to CMC and have extended an open invitation to him to speak on our campus in the future.’
The context of that withdrawal is hard to ignore. On August 12, 2022, during a literary event in western New York, Rushdie was attacked on stage by Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey. He was stabbed 15 times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The author lost the use of his right eye and suffered extensive internal injuries. Prosecutors said the attack was inspired by a 2006 speech by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah reaffirming the legitimacy of Khomeini’s fatwa.
Rushdie was the key witness at Matar’s trial earlier this year. ‘I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,’ he told the court. ‘My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.’
Prosecutors said Matar had planned the attack ‘so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it’.
Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted second-degree murder and seven years for second-degree assault, to run concurrently.
Despite declining to testify, he showed no sign of remorse – or, indeed, rationality. A known admirer of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and supporter of Shia extremism, Matar told the court before 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.’
Meanwhile, in the UK, the government is continuing to explore the adoption of an official definition of ‘Islamophobia’, led by a working group announced earlier this year. In a statement, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said any proposed wording produced by this new ‘Islamophobia council’ must be ‘compatible with the unchanging right of British citizens to exercise freedom of speech and expression’.
What could possibly go wrong?
