Salman Rushdie and the struggle for free speech

remained alive, he wrote in “Joseph Anton”, “the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him.” The book is a memoir of the years the author spent in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a urging Muslims to murder him and his publishers because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. That was in 1989; on Sir Salman (as he became in 2007) was stabbed as he was about to give a lecture in upstate New York. The past is never past—and history’s great, tectonic clashes are rarely over. That may be the main lesson from this dreadful episode. In the days before the and the years after it, the furore around Sir Salman’s book took the lives of demonstrators in India and Pakistan and of its Japanese translator. It set off one of the modern era’s great debates over free speech and the place and claims of religion in democracies. In the decades since, though, the threat to Sir Salman’s life seemed to fade. In recent years other worries, from the pandemic to Vladimir Putin’s bloody revanchism, have come to seem more urgent than that of Islamist violence, whether state-sponsored or otherwise.