The Rushdie case divides more than ever

Friday, August 19, in the morning, a dozen writers gathered in front of the main public library of New York, on the Ve Ave. Among them, Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Colum McCann, Reginald Dwayne Betts, journalists Tina Brown, Andrew Solomon and Gay Talese. At the invitation of PEN America, an association of writers committed to freedom of expression, these famous North American authors came to express their support for Salman Rushdie, still hospitalized after being stabbed several times during an attack at knifepoint on August 12. About a hundred people attended the readings and held up signs. Very little compared to the demonstration which had taken place thirty-three years earlier, on February 22, 1989, at the initiative of the same association, following the fatwa announced by Ayatollah Khomeini, condemning Salman to death Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses.

“Where did you go the solidarity I felt in 1989?, wonders today John R. MacArthur, the director of the Harper’s Magazine, indignant that the New York Times didn’t even publish an editorial after the attack. Where is the popular front to defend freedom of expression? » In 1989, nearly 500 people crowded inside the Columns, an artistic loft in Soho, in support of the British writer. Over 3,000 other supporters had gathered in front of the building, braving the rain and the cold. Interspersed among them, a few fanatics shouted: Death to Rushdie ! »

Join the publication of the book

At the origin of the event, the journalist John R. MacArthur, who had, in December 1988, exclusively published the good sheets of the satanic verses. He then considered it his duty to support Rushdie, who was beginning his clandestine life under the protection of the British secret service. Susan Sontag, who was president of the PEN Club, undertook after her to convince the authors to take part in a public reading of the satanic verses. It rallied twenty-one personalities, including Joan Didion, Claire Bloom, Edward Said, Don DeLillo or, already, Gay Talese. It took a little pushing for Norman Mailer, but he joined the troop. Sontag then appealed to the “civic courage”, to “refusal to be intimidated”.

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“Cowardice is horribly contagious, but this dreadful week has shown that courage can also be contagious”, wrote Christopher Hitchens in his Memoirs. The rally was not a rout “radical chic”according to the formula of Tom Wolfe, who mocked the revolutionary postures of the “Park Avenue leftists”. It was a question of symbolically associating oneself with the publication of the book, and therefore of dividing up the risks by declaring oneself “co-responsible” of publishing.

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