Rushdie got his death threat from the Ayatollah. Now you’re more likely to get one on Twitter

When Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a reader event in New York state, the violence was, paradoxically, made even more shocking by the length of time it had taken to eventuate. The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling on Muslims across the world to kill him.

Khomeini was offended by Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which satirised Islam in general and an Ayatollah-like figure in particular.

Ayatollah Khomeini, who died in 1989, had ordered Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie and others linked to the publication of The Satanic Verses.Credit: AP

The author was forced to go into hiding. For nine years he lived in Britain under police protection. Eventually, he moved to New York and, over the past decade, he has made public appearances and even become a feature of the literary end of Manhattan gossip columns.

Obviously, Rushdie, the organisers of the event and his readers had relaxed. So had the rest of us.

The threat of terrorism inspired by Islamic extremism has dissipated. In Australia, an increasingly assertive China is our No. 1 national security threat. Right-wing terrorism is a huge concern in the United States, not to mention in Australia and New Zealand, which experienced its deadly power in the Christchurch mosque attack of 2019.

More generally, the threats of pandemic, war and climate change have superseded worry about being bombed by a lunatic in a public place. We’ve all moved on to new existential anxieties.

The man accused of stabbing Rushdie, 24-yar-old Hadi Matar, has plead not guilty to second-degree murder and assault charges. Matar told the New York Post that Rushdie was “someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems”.

The time lag between fatwa and attack is remarkable (of course there were previous attacks on Rushdie’s editors and translators, one of them fatal, and on the bookstores that stocked his book, including one in Sydney). But even more remarkable is that since 1989, death threats, once the province of ayatollahs and terrorists, have become commonplace.

Social media is alive with them, and they tend to coalesce around certain subjects.

Several of my colleagues at The Sydney Morning Herald have received death threats (not me, I’ve only had rape threats). If you’re a woman, a person of colour, trans or disabled, you will be far more likely to have received one. Politicians get them all the time.

Illustration: Reg LynchCredit:

It is a profound social shift and a deeply alarming one. That citizens are threatening harm to one another, quite openly, is not something previous generations would have thought possible.

Yet it’s become utterly ordinary, and no longer do we expect the person making the threat to be a psycho with a weapons cache in his or her basement. The price of entry is much lower – you just need a Twitter account.

Most of the threats, of course, are idle, in the sense that there is no real intent or even ability to carry them out. But I wonder if their ubiquity has desensitised us to the fact that the prospect of their resulting in violence is very real.

Death threats, and their carriage on social media, are one of the sharpest points of the debate over cancel culture, which is so fraught that it’s even become a matter of political alignment as to whether one puts the term cancel culture in “scare quotes”.

And the attack on Rushdie has reopened arguments about cancel culture and freedom of speech, especially because we know what side Rushdie comes down on. He was one of the most high-profile signatories of an open letter published in Harper’s in 2020, which warned of a growing “censoriousness”, “an intolerance of opposing views” and a “vogue for public shaming and ostracism”.

Last week the Society of Authors, the largest British writers’ union, split down the middle after its chair tweeted about death threats on authors in a way some perceived as flippant. This tweet (later deleted and reposted with a different tone), revived hostilities over the fact that the society, and its chair, author Joanne Harris, did not come out condemning death threats against high-profile member JK Rowling. Rowling’s views on trans rights are deeply controversial.

One open letter circulating spoke of a “wish to express our deep disquiet and anger at the Society of Authors’ abject failure to speak out on violent threats towards its members”. A countering open letter expressed support for Harris.

People often elide artistic freedom with free speech as a political and public good, and the two issues merge into each other to a confusing extent. We saw this in the reaction to the shocking Charlie Hebdo attack of 2015, when the offices of the French satirical newspaper were stormed by Muslim terrorists. They killed 12 people and injured 11 others.

How all-out should a right-thinking person go in support of creative work that many saw as Islamophobic and even racist?

Rushdie is an author of soaring imaginative genius. He has written of his belief in the importance of blasphemy as a weapon against the power of religions. He has expressed doubt (as have others) that The Satanic Verses would be published today, not because it might offend mullahs, but because it might offend some on the left.

If any constraints at all are put on the subjects that such a novelist can write about, or the manner of his writing about them, we may as well give up on the project of literature entirely.

Most authors subject to death threats will not be actually stalked or stabbed by lunatics. But the fact is, Rushdie himself – who has lived for decades under the threat of violence, now made real – sees parallels between the mullahs and the censoriousness of social media. And that holds great moral power.

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