Literary Terrorism

Waldenbooks, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, has told its 1,200 outlets to stop displaying Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” after its author and all those involved in its publication were threatened with death by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The company said that it acted to protect its employees from possible terrorist acts. The B. Dalton bookstore chain plans to pull the book from its shelves. In New York the novel’s American publisher, Viking Penguin, was forced to shut its offices after receiving repeated bomb threats. In Paris the publishing house that was to bring out a French edition of “The Satanic Verses” announced that it would not now do so. Rushdie, an India-born Muslim who has lived in England for the last 20 years, has gone into hiding and canceled plans for an author’s tour of the United States.

Score one more victory for terrorism, then, and a defeat for the principles of freedom of speech, conscience and artistry that the West holds dear and that Khomeini and other reactionaries despise. Rushdie’s book has evoked anger and violence in parts of the Islamic world, where few have had a chance to read it, for its alleged insults to Muslim beliefs. It is possible to respect the intensity of those sentiments even as it is necessary to condemn and resist the efforts that they have inspired to suppress the novel in the non-Muslim world.It is one thing for Islamic regimes to ban the book in their own countries. It is quite something else when the threat of terrorism succeeds in denying people elsewhere the chance to read what they choose.

Waldenbooks says that it is putting the safety of its employees first. The unintended consequence of its decision, though, will surely be to make it more risky for other bookstores to go on displaying “The Satanic Verses.” And if coercive censorship is seen to work in the case of one book that some find offensive, what is to prevent coercion from being used again when other groups decide that other books are politically, socially or religiously objectionable? The Constitution says that Americans are free to read what they want, not what some fanatic in Tehran would allow.