Not For Bumping

Why these three books?

A novel, a sacred text, and a memoir sit together on this shelf. Choose a book to follow the story that connects them.

I keep these three books together intentionally to make visible the very real threat that theocracy poses to freedom of expression.

The Satanic Verses

Published in 1988, Salman Rushdie’s novel mixes the everyday with the fantastic. After an airliner explodes, two characters fall from the sky and undergo unsettling transformations. Fictional passages evoking the Prophet Muhammad were regarded as blasphemous by some readers.

Having read the book, I find its title a little misleading. Especially in light of what happened afterward, someone might imagine it involves devil worship or something far more pointedly blasphemous. That wasn’t my experience of it. To me, it reads as an interesting, fantastical story, and one would never guess that it would provoke such an extreme reaction.

Sources: the publisher’s description of the novel · PEN America.

The Quran

The Quran is Islam’s sacred scripture. It disapproves of mockery of divine revelation: verse 4:140 tells believers to leave a gathering where it is ridiculed until the conversation changes. That passage does not prescribe the death of a writer.

In 1989, after accusations of blasphemy against Rushdie’s novel, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death. That was a particular religious leader’s ruling, not a sentence lifted from the Quran.

Read: Quran, 4:140 · Khomeini’s 1989 statement (English translation).

Knife

For more than nine years after the fatwa, Rushdie lived in hiding, moved from house to house, and relied on armed police protection. Decades later, in 2022, he was stabbed as he prepared to speak in public at Chautauqua, New York. According to the U.S. Justice Department, his attacker had researched the 1989 fatwa and was trying to carry it out. Rushdie lost sight in his right eye.

His 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, recounts the attack, his survival, and the long work of recovery.

Sources: Joseph Anton · Knife · U.S. Justice Department.