ayatollah khomeini | Pandaemonium

TO SAY THE UNSAYABLE

August 18, 2022 by Kenan Malik

This essay, on Salman Rushdie and free speech, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 14 August 2022, under the headline “Where Salman Rushdie defied those who would silence him, today too many fear causing offence”. “A poet’s work,” one of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses observes, is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” “And if rivers of blood flow from […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, censorship, fatwa, free speech, islam, muslims, offence, peter mayer, salman rushdie, the satanic verses

FROM BOOK TO FATWA

February 15, 2019 by Kenan Malik

This week marks the 30th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (it was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1989). To mark the anniversary, here is an extract from Chapter 1 of my book From Fatwa to Jihad (pp 1-10),which tells the story of how the conflict over The Satanic Verses first arose. . 1 ‘It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots’, Salman Rushdie told the Indian journalist Shrabani Basu […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Culture & Books, Free Speech • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, fatwa, ghayasuddin siddiqui, iran, islam, islamism, muslims, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, saudi arabia, the satanic verses

‘TROUBLE IS AT THE HEART OF WHAT WE DO’

May 18, 2018 by Kenan Malik

Last week Pater Mayer died. He was a giant of the publishing industry. An American, he was in 1978 given the job of rescuing the venerable British publishers Penguin, which then had become almost defunct. He turned it into a global brand, and a major force in publishing. He transformed publishing in India by founding of Penguin India. Ten years later came the event that was to define both Mayer and Penguin. In September 1988 Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s The […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ayatollah khomeini, fatwa, free speech, islamism, penguin books, peter mayer, publishing, rushdie affair, salman rushdie, the satanic verses