Salman Rushdie | Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg News
I started off a recent entry saying that, while never safe, Salman Rushdie “was at least able to ferry himself between his residences” in New York and London “with only moderate concern for his wellbeing.”
That might have been overly optimistic, considering he recently pulled out of the Jaipur literary festival in India last Friday, citing what he believed were possibly credible death threats. He was due to discuss his award-winning 1981 book Midnight’s Children and to attend a number of other events, but as the Guardian reports, he released a statement alleging
[I had] been informed by intelligence sources … that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to eliminate me… it would be…irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience and to my fellow writers…to come to the festival in these circumstances.
As I mentioned at the time, Muslim cleric Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali, when apprised of Rushdie’s impending attendance of the festival, denounced him as a man who “hurt the sentiments of Muslims all over the world” before heading up calls for Rushdie to be denied a visa back into India. But as an Indian-born citizen, there are no such ban provisions—although his Satanic Verses book is still banned there.
Meanwhile, Islamic groups were planning marches in protest of Rushdie’s attendance, and one even offered a reward to anyone who could hit him with a shoe—a high insult in the culture.
When the 64 year-old author called an audible and mulled the idea of videoconferencing to ensure both his safety and his attendance, Muslim groups petitioned the Indian government to prevent it from happening. After similarly controversial Somalian writer Ayan Hirsi Ali read passages from the banned Satanic Verses, the same groups demanded an official investigation into the incident, calling such acts “a conspiracy to provoke Muslims by hurting their religious sentiments.”
And you thought SOPA was censorious.
