Is Blasphemy Illiberal? Salman Rushdie’s thoroughly modern controversies

Is Blasphemy Illiberal? Salman Rushdie's thoroughly modern controversies Len Gutkin (bio) We tend to think of blasphemy—an offense against God—as a relic of an antique past. It seems to belong to times and places where religion and law speak with one voice. And a stern one: in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites that "he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him." Though it may appear anachronistic in a secular democracy, Western liberalism has for much of its history preserved the concept of blasphemy, albeit with significant modifications. The locus [End Page 167] of offense shifted from the honor of the deity to the honor of His followers. Leviticus forbids it not because of how it made the Israelites feel but because of how it made God feel. But in America, England, and other modern nations, blasphemy came to be seen as legally culpable because it could wound religious feelings, and in so doing provoke tumults and even killings. Keeping the peace provided a legal warrant for restricting irreligious speech: blaspheme the name of the Lord, and the congregation might riot. Should "unrestricted license" be "permitted to all men to speak and write and act as they pleased," as an English Royal Commission wrote in 1841, "the feelings of mankind upon a subject of great moment"—religion—"would be frequently outraged." No one has run up against this distinctly modern understanding of blasphemy more dramatically than Salman Rushdie. In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Rushdie for the blasphemous crime of having written The Satanic Verses. A phantasmagoric epic drawing one of its central episodes from a contested piece of Islamic mythology in which Mohammed transcribes some Koranic verses dictated by Satan, the novel was condemned in many parts of the Muslim world. And some liberal thinkers in the West, rather than standing with Rushdie against the fatwa, blamed the author for causing offense. In 2022, more than thirty years later, a young man charged Rushdie with a knife at a speaking event in upstate New York. Rushdie was stabbed fifteen times. In his recent memoir, Knife, published earlier this year, Rushdie struggles to make sense of the attack. His first thought, he writes, was this: "Death was coming at me.…It struck me as anachronistic." Anachronism is a kind of leitmotif throughout the book: Rushdie was forty-one and at the height of his powers when the Iranian fatwa was issued, but seventy-five when someone almost succeeded in enforcing it. His assailant was "a sort of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past." Elsewhere: "the revenant past, seeking to drag me back in time." Fatefully, "an antique threat" was finally to be fulfilled. He quotes PEN America's CEO, Suzanne Nossel, to similar effect: [End Page 168] "When a would-be murderer plunged a knife into Salman Rushdie's neck, he pierced more than just the flesh of a renowned writer. He sliced through time, jolting all of us to recognize that horrors of the past were hauntingly present." While recovering, attended by the kind of security he had not needed in decades, "once again I felt dragged back into the ugly past." It's not artful, exactly, but the recurring metaphor of time travel suggests something more than just laziness or exhaustion. That one cannot be murdered for irreligious speech is, for most people in the West, a basic assumption. No one in Rushdie's first adopted country, England, has been legally executed for blasphemy since 1697; no one in his second adopted country, the United States, has ever been so, although heresy and witchcraft executions notoriously persisted in colonial New England. So the belated stabbing of Rushdie was "antique" not just in terms of his own life, but in a broader historical sense. In another way, though, the Satanic Verses controversy was thoroughly contemporary. It was made possible by the redefinition of blasphemy around the feelings of religious believers, and it brought that concern to bear on the complications of a diverse, pluralist society. ________ in england by the mid...