Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie – 25 Years

Hard to believe that it has been almost a generation since the infamous fatwa. While Spears go a bit far in his depiction of Iran (there are nuances and the Iranian govt has effectively disowned the fatwa), his fundamental points about some of the reaction in the West at the time are bang on.

I was in Iran at the time and it was somewhat surrealistic; we had re-opened the Canadian Embassy following the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, when there were efforts by the Iranian govt to open up to the world, and the fatwa set that back considerably.

Twenty-five years ago, on February 14, 1989, war was declared by Islamic end-times fundamentalists upon freedom of thought, freedom of speech, literature, secularism, human expression – in short, against civilization. This war was declared from within Iran, the origin of one of the world’s most ancient, rich and refined cultural traditions, the Persian civilization.

A Persian scholar, Hitoshi Igarashi did more for Iranian culture and letters than any Ayatollah, suicide bomber, or book burner ever could, or will. He is a reminder that the global village is a living and active idea, and that the war on terror is not so much a war among countries or cultures as it is a war for a certain kind of human community. Resistance against and repudiation of the holy warriors’ efforts to set the terms on which the world’s people are to live – or as is often the case, to die – is the work of this century, if not beyond.

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/02/14/wayne-k-spear-the-ayatollahs-fatwa-on-rushdie-25-years-old-and-just-as-evil/