Salman Rushdie has again instructed us in a profound lesson: great literature will always be a matter of life and death

, Rushdie’s memoir of the fatwa, it became a destabilising experience that took the writer into hiding with a team of special branch officers armed with sub-machine guns. This episode combined terror, boredom and farce, Jack Higgins crossed with Tom Sharpe. On one occasion, his minders offered him a wig in which, he admitted, he looked ridiculous. This short-lived experiment came to an end after his first outing in his new disguise, on a London street.

Rushdie had always been a gregarious metropolitan. Now he was in solitary confinement. “It’s an odd thing to have a price on your head,” he told one interviewer, fretting at his sequestration. “I’m tired of being hemmed in,” he said. There was, he argued, a difference between concealing someone and protecting them. For a while, he appeared to be suffering a life sentence.

Ever since he was born, in Mumbai, in 1947, Rushdie has been saying stuff, with himself as the centre of the conversation. The coincidence of his birth and national independence gave rise to a family joke: forget Gandhi or Nehru, it was baby Salman who forced the British out.inspired by Indian independence, remains a masterpiece of magical realism, widely recognised as a turning point in the remaking of the English novel in the late 20th century.

Such courage comes at a cost which, on Friday, became horrifyingly plain. The threat that Rushdie’s heroic act of willpower seemed to have neutralised, broke the illusion of normality like a knife through silk.returned. The 12 people who died in a riot in Mumbai, and the six killed during a riot in Islamabad; the books burned, and the bookshops firebombed. In 1991, the novel’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death and its Italian translator badly wounded.

Once again, Salman Rushdie has instructed us in a profound lesson about life and art. For an age that’s monetised creative endeavour to the limit, there’s something archetypal in the recognition that great literature will always be a matter of life and death.

And you can’t hug it out with Islamic extremists like some wokesters think is a remedy

Especially in American states where certain books aren’t even allowed in school libraries!

Another barbaric act of terrorising to stop the freedom of expression

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