Total Pageviews

Iranian Cleric Says Rushdie\'s Murder Could Stop Insults to Islam\'s Prophet

September 17, 2012, 6:42 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY

As my colleague Michiko Kakutani explains in her review of Salman Rushdie's new memoir, an Iranian religious foundation reportedly raised the price on the author's head over the weekend to $3.3 million. The cleric who leads the foundation claimed that the novelist's murder would stop others from disrespecting Islam's founder, The Associated Press reported from Tehran.

The Indian-born author's book, “Joseph Anton,” describes the nine years he spent in hiding, after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced him to death in 1989, for basing a fictional character on the Prophet Muhammad in his novel “The Satanic Verses.” In an interview with BBC Radio 4 broadcast on Saturday, Mr. Rushdie spoke of th e parallels between the anger at his novel and the past week's violent protests by fundamentalist Muslims offended at the trailer for a crude film mocking the prophet posted on YouTube in July.

Although Mr. Rushdie resurfaced in 1998, after a reformist Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, made it clear that his government had no intention of carrying out the death sentence, hardliners in Iran insist that the late Ayatollah Khomeini's religious edict, or fatwa, cannot be rescinded.

Ayatollah Hassan Saneii, an Iranian cleric whose foundation first offered millions for the murder of Mr. Rushdie more than a decade ago, said in a statement published on Sunday in the hard-line daily Jomhuri Islami: “As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini's historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won't be the last insult. If the fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have contin ued would have not happened.”

The senior cleric's comments echoed remarks made two days earlier by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, who said in a statement on the film, “this great and unforgivable sin would not have been committed,” if the United States and other countries “had refused to support the previous links in this evil chain - namely, Salman Rushdie, the Danish cartoonist and Koran-burning American pastors.”

Speaking to the BBC as protests unfolded across the Muslim world, Mr. Rushdie deplored the “extraordinary, thin-skinned, paranoid reaction” to “this idiotic video.” The author also described the crude biopic of Muhammad - which was apparently directed by a Coptic Christian extremist in California who duped actors into participating in the film by calling the main character “George” during the shoot - as “a piece of garbage that would be better named ans such and dismissed.” But, he added, “the idea that you react to that by holding an entire nation and its diplomatic representatives responsible for something which they weren't remotely aware of is ugly and wrong.”

The author also told the BBC: “The events surrounding ‘The Satanic Verses' created, I think, a climate of fear that has no dissipated, and that, I think, makes it harder for books - not even books critical of Islam… anything about Islam, to be published. This idea of respect, which is a code word for fear, is something that we have to overcome.”

Writing on Twitter over the weekend, Mr. Rushdie recommended an essay by William Saletan for Slate headlined, “Internet Videos Will Insult Your Religion. Get Over It.”

In the essay, Mr. Saletan observed:

To day, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors' mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody-literally nobody-came to watch it.

Indeed, it does appear that the fury is over a film that might have disappeared without a ripple, if an Islamist television host in Egypt had not discovered it online and driven hundreds of thousands of viewers to the trailer on YouTube. Steve Klein, a Christian fundamentalist who claims to have acted as a consultant on the film, told Bloomberg News that no one came to the film's sole screening, at a cinema on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. “I got there about a half hour before the movie starte d and stayed a half hour after it started,” Mr. Klein told the news agency, “and I saw zero - nada, none, no people - go inside.”