Salman Rushdie and the struggle for free speech
A horrific attack shows the old battles still rage
The longer Salman Rushdie remained alive, he wrote in “Joseph Anton”, “the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him.” The book is a memoir of the years the author spent in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa urging Muslims to murder him and his publishers because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. That was in 1989; on August 12th Sir Salman (as he became in 2007) was stabbed as he was about to give a lecture in upstate New York.
This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Never-ending story”
From the August 20th 2022 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Leaders
Sir Keir Starmer should aim higher in his reset with the EU
And he needs to be clearer about what Britain wants
To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world’s grids
Less than 3% of the world’s power is internationally traded—a huge wasted opportunity
Chinese AI is catching up, posing a dilemma for Donald Trump
The success of cheap Chinese models threatens America’s technological lead
America has an imperial presidency
And in Donald Trump, an imperialist president for the first time in over a century
Tariffs will harm America, not induce a manufacturing rebirth
Donald Trump’s pursuit of tariffs will make the world poorer—and America, too
How to improve clinical trials
Involving more participants can lead to new medical insights