No Safety Behind the Wall

If no one had been hurt, reasonable people might simply ignore the disturbances surrounding publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses.” But people have been killed and injured in this senseless tumult, and that awful fact reminds us that the intolerance of free expression ought to be opposed always and everywhere.

Rushdie is a gifted British author who was born into a Muslim family in Bombay, India. His new book, a fanciful meditation on the origins of belief and Britain’s attitudes toward its Indian immigrants, takes its name from the lines that Mohammed is said to have omitted from the Koran because they were inspired by the devil. Some devout Muslims see Rushdie’s allegory as an insult to their faith.

Already banned in India, Pakistan and South Africa, the book also has been the target of public protests in England. Booksellers who stock it have been threatened. Over the past two days, five Pakistanis and an Indian have been killed in rioting touched off by the novel’s impending publication in the United States. The affair took an even more sinister turn when Tehran radio announced that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had pronounced a “sentence of death” on Rushdie and his publishers.

Such squalid goings-on have as little to do with religion as they have with literature. What they have to do with is fear and intolerance, and the way in which those in thrall to them can be manipulated by the cynical and the callous.

Open societies often appear to be chaotic, threatening places. But there is no safety behind the wall of censorship. To the contrary: The rioting in Pakistan was in fact fomented by opponents of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto; their casualties were not martyrs to religious truth, but unwitting victims of sordid political deception. The Ayatollah Khomeini is no more a religious leader than was the Borgia Pope. He is a garden-variety tyrant whose apparently irrepressible impulse to evil mischief expresses itself in a religious vocabulary. People expose themselves to exploitation by Khomeini and his kind when they delude themselves into thinking that the security of their own values depends on denying others the right to express their opinions.

Those who believe that this is a lesson to be learned only in Islamic societies need only recall the West’s recent convulsions over Martin Scorsese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

That this latest controversy has nothing to do with Islam itself was brought home to us on Tuesday during a conversation with Dr. Maher Hathout, the erudite spokesman for the Islamic Center of Southern California. He pointed out that tolerance of differing opinions derives its sanction in Islamic tradition from the fact that the Koran itself records the criticisms directed against Mohammed by his contemporaries.

Hathout said that he had just finished reading “The Satanic Verses” and that, personally, he found its language “crude” and its appropriation of Islamic scripture “discourteous.” He recommended that those of similar sentiment read Rushdie’s earlier novels. “They are more interesting,” he said, “and are discounted on the bargain tables at local bookstores.”

There speaks the voice of reason, as well as faith.