Foretelling Rushdie

Many column inches have been expended this week on the second and inevitable part of the Salman Rushdie Affair. Despite Iran officially rescinding its support for the fatwa imposed on the author by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the blasphemy — which writer Kenan Malik noted in 2019 was “undeniably critical and insulting” — remains.

Burning books in protest is as old as books themselves. Next stop: burning them as policy. Take Captain Beatty, the fire chief in novelist Ray Bradbury’s , a novel whose main character, Guy Montag, is a disillusioned fireman whose job is not to put out fires but to start them — with books. Bradbury’s novel, partly inspired by Nazi book burnings, was banned in apartheid SA as well as by Florida’s Bay County school board for its “vulgarity”, so he knew a thing or two about intolerance.

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Foretelling RushdieBurning books a short step from burning authors — or stabbing them.
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NICOLE FRITZ: Courts have become battlefields that pit democracy against warThe stabbing of Salman Rushdie shows that instead of reasoned debate reigning, violence taints public exchanges
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Rushdie attacker says 'surprised' author survived: NY PostThe New Jersey man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie told the New York Post in an interview published Wednesday that he was 'surprised' the author had survived the attack. The attacker forgot that a modern medical system was functioning there. I’m gradually making more earnings now in my trades but with the aid of a trader that was recommended and now I'm recommending her to y'all EliDonovan01
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This is why fatwas have haunted novelists and thinkers such as RushdieThe attempt on the writer’s life is not an isolated incident; those who dared criticise Islamic beliefs have faced similar threats
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Could a writer in SA be attacked like Rushdie? How free are creatives here?Public discourse and critical engagement needs to be re-examined, and curricula must be developed as part of civic education to enable us to learn how to navigate our differences, writes Eusebius
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Could a writer in SA be attacked like Rushdie? How free are creatives here?Public discourse and critical engagement needs to be re-examined, and curricula must be developed as part of civic education to enable us to learn how to navigate our differences, writes Eusebius
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