Iran Urged to Lift Rushdie Threat : Religion: The world’s largest book fair opened in Frankfurt with a ringing denunciation of Iran’s execution order against author Salman Rushdie.

In a stinging attack that indicates the controversy over author Salman Rushdie has not abated, the director of the 1989 Frankfurt Book Fair on Tuesday called on Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani to revoke the call for the British writer’s murder.

At a news conference preceding the opening of the world’s largest assemblage of publishers, editors, agents, authors and booksellers, director Peter Weidhaas vehemently defended Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” provoked the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to urge his execution on grounds that it blasphemed Islam.

Weidhaas said he was speaking “in the name of the worldwide community of publishers assembled here,” and he said Iran could not participate in the fair “as long as this murder threat has not been withdrawn.”

Since the original death threats made last winter by Khomeini, Rushdie--who was born in India a Muslim but who has become a British citizen--has been in hiding.

Radical Islamic fundamentalists have attacked bookstores in Britain and other countries for selling the novel and have inhibited publishers in some nations from printing the book in local languages.

In sketching the background of the Rushdie incident, Weidhaas, departing from the usual genteel pleasantries that mark the opening of Frankfurt book fairs, said that “it would appear that the tide of anti-progressive thought is rising all over the world.”

“There has been a call for murder,” said the German director, who has spent 30 years in the book business, “a call for murder which is directed against the most fundamental interests of the people who make up this fair.”

He added: “The curse of this murder threat was also extended to cover the publishers of his book and the booksellers offering it for sale.”

Thus, he said, “The Satanic Verses” has become the focus of a fundamental clash, a fight for the revolutionary and progressive achievement of freedom of speech, the freedom to distribute the word and the free flow of information.

Weidhaas said he regrets the increased security necessary here for the more than 200,000 visitors expected to attend the 41st book fair, which runs Wednesday through Monday, but he added, that in effect, the fair must go on “in defiance of all obscurantist conspiracies.”

“The Satanic Verses” was originally published in Britain by Viking-Penguin and by the same firm in the United States. On Tuesday, officials for both organizations said they would not be showing the book on their display stands.

The German publishers of “Satanic Verses” are about to publish it--but have withheld it until after the prestigious fair here, fearing violent protests.

“The decision to postpone publication was made in light of a variety of threats that the publishers have received in past months,” said Klaus Kluge of Boersenverein, a trade group of all West German bookstores and publishers.

The German edition will be published by a group of about 100 publishers from West Germany, Austria and Switzerland to discourage Muslim retaliations against any single member.

In his speech here Tuesday, Weidhaas extended his criticisms to include “the fundamentalist threat to free communication in the modern age.”

He said: “The hatred we have seen in this case, the aggression against an author, his publishers and booksellers, reveal to my eyes a basic, underlying phenomenon--a problem between the industrialized world and the outstripped world of the so-called ‘developing countries.’ It is the modern age’s historic burden of guilt.

“The Islamic Republic is an expression of defense against the cultural engulfment of the Islamic world by the culture of the modern age. It reflects the failure of a thoughtless policy of modernization in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries.”

Weidhaas said the book fair is “in fact a dialogue of the First World with itself: More than 80% of the world’s entire book trading is actually carried out by only a dozen of the over 90 countries represented at the Frankfurt fair.

“The historic horizon of the modern age must be the successful synthesis of the world’s cultures. This calls for the combination of cultural forces, not threats of murder. It calls for the expansion of cultural dialogue, not fundamentalist separatism.”

BACKGROUND

Iran has shown no sign of budging on the call by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for Salman Rushdie’s death. In June, Iranian President (then-Parliament Speaker) Hashemi Rafsanjani told a press conference that the “prescription” against Rushdie on charges of blasphemy cannot be changed. “There is no one in Iran who would want to or could take back that prescription,” he said.