“Nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence”, was indignant Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper decimated by an Islamist attack in 2015, after the attack on the writer Salman Rushdie, target for more than 30 years of a fatwa from Iran.
“As we write these lines, we do not know the motivations of the author of the knife attack on Salman Rushdie. Was he revolted against global warming, against the decline in purchasing power or against the ban on watering flower pots because of the heat wave?”, writes ironically Riss, chief editor of Charlie Hebdo and one of the few survivors of the 2015 attack, in a post on the newspaper’s website .
“Let’s then take the risk of saying that he is probably a believer, that he is just as probably a Muslim and that he committed his act even more probably in the name of the fatwa launched in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, and condemning him to death.”
Read also: Salman Rushdie stabbed: an eye, an arm and his liver damaged
Riss castigates ‘mediocre little spiritual leaders’
“The freedom to think, reflect and express oneself has no value for God and his servants. And in Islam, whose history has often been written in violence and submission, these values are not simply have no place because they are so many threats against his hold on the minds”, argues Riss. He rejects the idea that “the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was all the more revolting because what he had written in his book, + The Satanic Verses +, was absolutely not disrespectful of Islam” .
Read also: When Salman Rushdie told his “life on death row”
According to him, it is a “reasoning of a very great perversity because it induces that, conversely, disrespectful remarks towards Islam would justify a fatwa and a punishment, even if it is fatal”.
“Well no, we will have to repeat again and again that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence, of anyone for anything”, insists Riss, castigating “mediocre little spiritual leaders , intellectually dull and often culturally ignorant”.
In January 2015, Charlie Hebdo was the victim of an Islamist attack which killed 12 people, including cartoonists Charb, Cabu and Wolinski, after publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
This attack had aroused worldwide emotion, and Salman Rushdie had then expressed his “solidarity with Charlie Hebdo”. “Charlie Hebdo” also broadcast this satirical cartoon, a few hours after the attack on Salman Rushdie.
By #Foolz. pic.twitter.com/DJA4TC2FhO
— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) August 13, 2022