Rushdie assault an attack on more than freedom of speech

Salman Rushdie is a writer of great intelligence, imagination, and invention. But above all, in my experience, he possesses two qualities that set him apart from those seeking to murder him for a novel that most of them have surely never read: complexity and nuance.

And those qualities are indispensable to unraveling the wider implications of last week’s horrific knife attack on the British author at a literary event in western New York.

The attack itself was anything but an act of nuance. It was a frontal assault on the freedom of expression essential not just to literature or art, but to the health of democratic societies.

Yet it also signaled the erosion of a deeper foundation of any well-functioning democracy, of which freedom of expression is just one stone: the free exchange of ideas and opinions, grounded in the kind of respect and tolerance that allows for disagreement, even strident disagreement, without demonizing those whose views we don’t share.

“Open debate and toleration of differences” were the values Mr. Rushdie defended in an open letter, published in Harper’s Magazine, that he co-signed two years ago amid a steadily growing atmosphere of populist-stoked intolerance on both the right and left in the United States and other democracies.

Those have never been easy ideals to live up to. The quest to define – and limit – freedom of expression long predates the 1989 fatwa, or Muslim legal ruling, by which Iran’s ruling Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for the killing of Mr. Rushdie for his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Until then, legislation and judicial rulings in the U.S. and other democracies had produced a consensus of sorts over where limits to expression were needed: libel and slander, for instance, or incitement to hatred and violence that could lead to the physical harm of fellow citizens.

The underlying assumption was that to punish words simply because they gave offense to somebody’s feelings, beliefs, or political views would strip freedom of expression of all meaning.

Over recent years, that assumption has come under fire. Especially in the U.S., an angry, almost gladiatorial tone in public discourse has led to moves to restrict the expression of opinions that cause offense – with the definition essentially left to those who say they feel offended. That tendency has been supercharged by social media platforms, on which campaigns against an author, politician, public figure, or even an ordinary citizen can be organized within hours, often anonymously.

It is a trend that first emerged in the fatwa against Mr. Rushdie.

It was encouraged, he has always felt, by the equivocal response by some Western political and religious leaders, who said, in effect: “Yes, it’s wrong of the ayatollah to call for the murder of a novelist, but Mr. Rushdie was wrong to have published a book that could offend millions of Muslims.”

I remember wondering at the time whether any of them had read the novel or spoken to Mr. Rushdie. I was fortunate to have done both, just 48 hours before the fatwa. Amid the escalating denunciations of Mr. Rushdie, I’d expected “The Satanic Verses” to be a polemical tract, and the author to be an anti-Islamic firebrand.

But the book turned out to be a marvel of magical realism, full of unlikely twists and dream sequences. And while I could see how its imagined depiction of the prophet Muhammad could indeed offend Muslims – if they chose to read it – it was not a book about the prophet or about Islam.

It was, as Mr. Rushdie explained in the front room of the London home he would soon have to flee, essentially about “the experience of being an immigrant,” drawing on Mr. Rushdie’s own experience, as a Mumbai-born Indian Muslim who was now very much a British author.

When we next met, six years later, he was in hiding from the fatwa. We talked about how, despite his nonobservant upbringing, Islam’s texts and traditions still had a hold on him as a writer. “Yes,” he remarked, smiling, “I guess we are obsessed by what we don’t believe in.” Still, he did believe in “revelation” and ached to understand it. The controversial passages about Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses” had been his way of doing so, trying to “get inside” the head of the prophet, “outside Mecca, when revelation came.”

What struck me – even more so now, as Mr. Rushdie begins his recovery from his knife injuries – was that the fatwa had thrown down a daunting challenge for democratic societies by taking doctrinal aim at a novel born of contemplation and personal exploration.

In his open letter a couple of years ago, Mr. Rushdie seemed almost quaintly to imagine the kind of civil environment that might make it possible for his novel to coexist with its critics and detractors, who, of course, had an equal right to be heard.

A society, the letter said, in which the way you “defeat” ideas you reject is by “argument and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.”

The irony – the key difficulty facing a deeply divided America too – is that this isn’t just a matter of freedom of expression, being able to write and say what you think, feel, or hold dear.

It’s about being able to listen as well.