THE DESPICABLE ATTACK ON SALMAN RUSHDIE

Four days ago, British-born author Salman Rushdie was stabbed by a knife-wielding attacker at a literary event in New York. Rushdie who remains hospitalized, suffered wounds to his throat and liver, and may lose an eye.

Rushdie’s crime was writing a book‘- The Satanic Verses’- which someone with a narrow mind, disagreed with.

Rushdie was forced into hiding thirty years ago, after a man of the cloth with fundamentalist beliefs, somewhere in Iran, felt was critical of his particular religious belief, and so he ordered Rushdie’s murder.

Whether it was to emphasize the gravity of the author’s crime, or whether the cleric did not want to ‘dirty’ his own hands by committing the dastardly act himself, he (the cleric) placed a bounty of over a million dollars to be paid to whoever would kill Rushdie.

What is at stake here, is not whether what Rushdie wrote was right or wrong. What is important is his right to express his opinion in his own flowery style whether it be ‘satanic’ or otherwise. Many of us may be opposed to ideas Rushdie expressed via his ‘Satanic Verses’. But it is our bounden duty to defend his right to continue expressing his views.

The right to express our beliefs is fundamental to our freedom and throughout history writers and thinkers have dared to challenge entrenched beliefs. It takes courage to stand up for one’s beliefs especially in the face of intimidation, threats of violence and persecution.

The murder of the 16th century Italian philosopher (and former Catholic priest) Giordano Bruno, - burned at the stake - for saying that the world was spherical by the Roman Inquisition in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori is, but another example extremist fundamentalists with entrenched beliefs.

Likewise the violent attack on Rushdie, was not simply an attempt on the life of a brilliant author with whom fundamentalists disagreed with, it was an attack on freedom itself. The attempt on the life of Rushdie also brings out the dangers freedom faces in today’s society.

When groups of young people (in Sri Lanka) were asked their reaction to attacks on journalists and or authors, many a young person answered that it was neither shocking nor unusual. Such acts to them had become the ‘new normal’.

Free expression is being regarded by too many, not as something precious we need to defend against erosion. Far too many have begun to take these freedom taken for granted. A sad, but shocking truth. The opinion vocalized by young people is true.

The danger is that many of us are taking the freedom that we enjoy today for granted. Many people seem to have forgotten the loss of freedom we went through during the near three-decade war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

A time during which the ruling clique made use of the emergency laws at that time, to take away our right to criticize. A time when a number of journalists and dissenters were picked up off the streets in unmarked white vans. A time when journalists and editors were forced to practice selfcensorship to avoid their offices being burned and destroyed as well as to avoid harm to themselves and their families.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 25 media workers and journalists in our own country were killed between 1992 and 2022.

The ‘Guardian’ reported when Rushdie was knighted for services to literature, some argued it was a misstep, as though little-minded persons should have a right to veto “exquisite talent”.

Rushdie however has been a journalist of a different calibre. Despite the ever present death threats, he continued appearing at public seminars and literary events in defiance of those with little minds who attempted to silence him.

He has paid a huge price for his defence of the right to freedom. We need to let this latest attempt to curb our freedom jolt us out of our comfort zones in defence of what in the end is our own freedom.