by Grania
Iranian intellectuals and secularists must be shaking their heads in dismay at this news. A group of state-run media outlets in Iran have grouped together and raised an additional US$600,000.00 to renew the fatwa, originally declared in 1989, on the life of Salman Rushdie for the crime of writing a book that you can guarantee most have never even seen, let alone read.
The fatwa although in 1998 then president Mohammad Khatami declared the fatwa over, however The Guardian reports
“Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out,” Iran’s deputy culture minister Seyed Abbas Salehi.
In the intervening years, four people who worked on translations of the novel The Satanic Verses were attacked, three of them fatally, by murderous zealots rushing to fulfil this cowardly commandment.
There’s a list of fresh new cowardly zealots on the FARS News Agency who contributed funds to the fatwa reward over here.
There is very little left to say, other than I mourn for the many people in Iran who surely do not want this, and I hope that Mr Rushdie will be safe. Instead take a look at what Muslims who have read the book have written about it. Much saner and far more interesting.
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It might be too conspiracist to note this coincidence.
The renewal of the fatwa coincides with this report…
http://www.weeklystandard.com/fascist-down/article/2001196#.VssSI4mTuj0.twitter
…on the death of Adomis Nasr of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party who boasted of beating up Rushdie’s buddy Christopher Hitchens in 2009 in the defacing of the swastika incident.
The Syrian regime is Iran’s clients: it’s hard to put anything past that confederacy of gangsters. Hitch might only be surprised at Obama’s de facto support for Assad. x
A fatwa can be can be purchased for a certain sum of cash? Doesn’t surprise me, most religious folk seem to worship money, another symtom of the sociopathology.
Comment to self: Since they’s no edit button here, I guess I’ll have to write another post to correct my spelling in my last post—the “the” in my last post before the self-created word “sociopathology” should have been spelled their, not the.
Thank you.
Yes, I’m wondering, too, about the 600K figure- is this the standard price to renew a fatwa? Would 400K not have been enough? What is this money used, for, anyway? A bounty on his head?
Rushdie is also not for those in a hurry – it took me more than a month to read both The Satanic Verses and Midnight’s Children.
Maybe 5yrs ago I got hold of a copy of the SV’s. I forced myself to make it to pg 100, whereupon I heaved a sigh and took it back to the library. At around pg 90 it got lucid for about 3pgs in re. a fundamentalist on the plane who gets jammed in the jaw with a Kalashnikov (or some such) thereby severing his tongue, but then lapsed back into loopiness.
I guess you have to be a Sophisticated Muslim to be offended.
Phew, glad I’m not the only one who chose not to wade through all of it.
I bought a copy of Verses in ’89 as an act of solidarity after the fatwa was declared. Read the disputed passages, then later set out to read the whole thing straight through. Never made it.
I’ve moved a few times since then, but have always lugged it with me, thinking I’d give it another go. Spotted is in a bookcase the other day, still with the same bookmark, still right where I left it. Maybe I will give it another shot, you never know …
I’ve more than a few books on the shelves with those ancient bookmarks…
And of course if I ever did get back to them I’d probably have to start over on page one anyway. Ah, human nature.
I remember leafing through a copy in a bookshop when it was first published, and thinking “This is a lot of nonsense”.
Perhaps I’m just not sophisticated enough. 🙁
Some writing seems to be a bit like maths. Some people read if for pleasure, others must put on waders. I skimmed the book years ago and thought there must be something profound here, but I guess I’m not quite up to it. The word “masochism” flashed in my mind.
Loved his memoir, Joseph Anton, but the 2 or 3 novels of his I’ve read, including Midnight’s Children, have too much magical realism for my taste. I decided to forgo Satanic Verses.
The link to the list of Rushdie fatwa contributors went down rather quickly!
I wouldn’t be too unhappy if someone saved the list somewhere and we began to see the contributors go down rather quickly.
The words “coward” and “hypocrite” spring to mind. They don’t even have the courage to stand up for their opinions. Which brings a third word to mind: “loser.”
Yes, this, like most of the remainder of the religion, is the part they don’t like to talk about. You are like a suicide bomber with no button to push. Just say the magic words and no bomb required.
“Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out,” Iran’s deputy culture minister Seyed Abbas Salehi.
Patently it is fading out:
Even with new bounty, Rushdie is now far safer if the lure of the money is anything to go by. Inflation means that in addition to the new $600,00.00, an extra $2,202,707 (and 93 cents) would be needed to equal the 1989 fatwah prices.
From what I understood of the source articles, the extra 600k is merely to top up the original money. ~Grania
Yes that is true, but the original bounty has remained at $3,000,000 since it was issued in 1989. Had it risen in line with inflation the fatwah would now pay out a whopping $5,802,707 (and 93 cents). So even with the new addition of $600,000, they remain $2,202,707 (and 93 cents) short.
Yet they give the impression that yer average Jihadi has never had it so good.
Sounds like David Cameron & George Osborne addressing the the Working Poor.
We can only hope that, if their government is anything like ours, that they’ve already spent all of this money on something else, anyway!
Issued, I’m sure, to remind everyone that Iran is a theocratic totalitarian dictatorship, using modern means to try to drag civilization back to the Dark Ages of ignorance and intellectual repression.
And it’s a pledge of allegiance by the Iranian media to the Supreme Leader Ali Khameini that they are on his side in the forthcoming ‘elections’ of vetted Islamists.
Nice to see Iran takes the fight for social justice more seriously than we do.
In America, our journalist school professors only assault and mock reporters citing the First Amendment.
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Reblogged this on HealMinds.
The barbarians are at the gate.
If the people of Iran ever apply a French-style revolution to their theocratic overlords, I for one will not be sorry for the theocrats.
They tried in 1979 but the Communist Party told the masses to support Khomeini in true 2-stage Stalinist style: first Khomeini, then us. The same as in 1933: the German KPD leader Thälmann claimed, “First Hitler, then us.” Disastrous both times. x
I remember vividly living in a more conservative part of America in 1988, both the year of “The Satanic Verses” and of Martin Scorsese’s film of “The Last Temptation of Christ”. The attacks on LToC were fairly ignorant and showed a poor understanding of both the book and literature in general.
But no one was threatening to kill director MS. The worst I recall was a pastor offering a large sum of money to Universal Studios for every print of the film which he planed to burn in a bonfire. The ultimate victory of the fundamentalists was the production of Mel Gibson’s godawful (literally and figuratively) “The Last Temptation of Christ”. (Remarkably few noticed that Blockbuster started carrying the DVDs of the Scorcese film the same day that Gibson’s film was released in theaters.)
Still, I could have lived without Pat Buchanan’s stomach-turning editorial on the Scorcese film, interpreting it as a deliberate blasphemous mockery of Jesus. (No Pat, slightly better qualified in that department is Mel Brook’s “History of the World”, a film I also liked.)
THREE translators of SatVrs killed. Did not know that.