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b7409f2
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When the telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's , I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship--though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involved...
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bastille
bullying
censorship
demagogy
dictatorship
enlightenment
fascism
fatwa
first-amendment
free-speech
friendship
george-hw-bush
hate
humor
individualism
intimidation
iran
irony
khomeini
literature
love
principles
religion
rushdie
satanic-verses
stupidity
theocracy
united-states
united-states-constitution
washington-post
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Christopher Hitchens |
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b452748
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"Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called "Rushdie," and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroes, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd." --
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averroës
fatwa
free-speech
history
ibn-rushd
literary
memoir
religion
secularism
terrorism
war
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Salman Rushdie |