Salman Rushdie was right to warn us about a slippery slope on free speech

IWAS privileged to attend the British Book Awards on Monday. There were buckets of champagne and wine, and a threecourse meal. But the highlight of the evening was not the food and drink, the literary chat, the gossip. It was Sir Salman Rushdie appearing on the video screen, his right eye was covered by darkened glasses. His voice sounded croaky and fatigued.

In August last year Rushdie was attacked in Chautauqua, New York, by a young man. It was a gruesome reminder of the death sentence (fatwa) imposed on him by the savage theocracy of Iran in February 1989 for the alleged crime of writing a novel: The Satanic Verses. I was moved by his resilience.

But what was striking about Rushdie’s acceptance speech — for the Freedom to Publish award, sponsored by Index on Censorship — was that he didn’t speak about his experience of being continually threatened with murder over 30 years. Nor did he mention those who are imprisoned or killed for writing a book or making a speech. His message was not about China, Russia, North Korea or Saudi Arabia. It was about the liberal West, and what he sees as the growing threats against freedom of expression within nations that claim to cherish this principle.

“The freedom to publish,” Rushdie said, “is also the freedom to read. And the ability to write what you want.” But this conviction is now being weakened: “We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression and freedom to publish has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”

This is not a problem that’s confined to the political Right or Left. Rushdie mentioned the “extraordinary attack on libraries and books for children in schools” in the US. A recent report by PEN America has found that book bans are rapidly rising in the US.

Across the country, novels by distinguished authors such as Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood have been banned in schools and libraries. Rushdie argued that this constitutes an “attack on the ideas of libraries themselves.”

But he also described as “alarming” the trend where “publishers bowdlerise the work of such people as Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming.” This is where editors are trying to ‘update’ novels by dead authors by removing or replacing offensive words or phrases. Rushdie argued that “the idea that

James Bond could be made politically correct is almost comical.”

Rushdie viscerally understands the severe end of censorship; he has been nearly murdered for writing a book. But he is also rightly cognisant of, and opposed to, the milder threats. Because he recognises that the two ends are interlinked: once we accept that some books should not be allowed to be published, or read, or should have their content suppressed or bowdlerised in any other way, we accept the logic of those who think freely producing such books is a crime worthy of prison or death.

Rushdie has been nearly murdered for writing a book, but he’s also rightly cognisant about the milder threats