“Was it performance art?” Rushdie wondered. Or a case of magical-realist memory? It had been, in August 2022, 33 years since Ayatollah Khomeini’s call to kill Rushdie, well beyond the bounds of Matar’s lifetime. Or a hair-raising exercise in irony? Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution, in upstate New York, to talk about “writer safety”. Matar’s own mutterings suggest nothing quite so sophisticated. The picture that emerges from his interview with New York Post is that of a bumbling Four Lions type completely out of his depth. What of his politics? “I respect the Ayatollah. I think he’s a great person.” And Rushdie? “I don’t think he’s a very good person.” Why? “He’s someone who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.” Their beliefs? It doesn’t sound like Matar cared much for them himself.

Matar evidently isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer (Rushdie missed a trick there). I suppose he would react to a subordinate clause in much the same way as a deer would to headlights. Schooled in sunny California before settling in suburban New Jersey, Matar’s locutions are to me yet another reminder of how the American education system is failing its citizens. He grew up in a comfortable $700,000, four-bed home with his twin sisters and mother, and saw no reason to earn a living until a few months before the botched assassination, when he took up a gig at Marshalls, America’s version of Poundland. For most of his late teens and early 20s, Matar led an inverted life, “sleeping during the day”, and, at night, “playing video games, watching Netflix, stuff like that”. The Italians would have called him a bamboccione, the quintessential man-child, eking out a lumpen existence in his mum’s basement.

He was, in short, hardly an unreconstructed, ideologically driven Islamist. He had no contact with the Revolutionary Guard. Nor was he of Iranian heritage. His parents were in fact from Yaroun in southern Lebanon — Hezbollah heartland. His mother, who has since disowned her son, wanted nothing to do with that world, to which his father returned after their divorce. In 2018, the young Matar visited him in Yaroun, where he developed a heightened awareness of his cerebral shortcomings. Indeed, he chafed at this on his return. “He was angry that I did not introduce him to Islam from a young age,” his mother would later say to the Daily Mail.

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Still, the Koran and Hadiths were not for him. He instead sought identification with a couple of Hezbollah militant apparatchiks, two of whose names he fused to adopt the nom de guerre Hassan Mughniyeh, the alias under which he arrived at Chautauqua. In Knife, Rushdie recounts a doctor’s remark: “You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” as clueless about murder as he was about Rushdie’s oeuvre or Islam. Clearly, his motivations were less theological and more political. Notice how he has nothing to say about the sharia or the actual beliefs of Muslims. Rushdie’s sin rather seems to be that he “attacked their beliefs”. This is not the language of Islamists, but rather the impeccably liberal — if you like “Western,” even “woke” — language of minority rights and safe spaces, of hate speech and minoritarian victimhood.

Matar has given his grievance an adventitious, exotic colouring, but the truth is that his sense of wounded entitlement is of a piece with the general hostility to free speech we see around us in the West. There is, no doubt, something deeply illiberal about this declension of liberalism — with its stress on silencing those cruel children of the Enlightenment, with their unfeeling, universalising, secularising ways — but I suspect its votaries aren’t over-bothered by the contradiction. Contrary to what critics of wokery think, this isn’t a new development. As Faisal Devji has argued, much the same was true of the original controversy around The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s critics, then as now, were not Islamist fundamentalists but woke — avant la lettre — Western Muslims. As Devji put it, their grievance turned more on “secular hurt than sin”.

Indeed, Rushdie’s book was burned in Bradford and Bolton and banned in Delhi long before it was noticed in the Muslim world. Khomeini was late to the party. Then again, his fatwa against Rushdie (properly speaking, a hukm since fatwas are juridical pronouncements made by religious authorities to clarify points of Islamic law, whereas hukms are ordered by government figures in a purely secular capacity) had more to do with his geopolitical wooing of Sunnis invested in the Prophet (the Shias by contrast revere Imam Ali more) in the wake of the First Gulf War than “Islamist” outrage. Meanwhile, British Muslims were using the thoroughly modern language of blasphemy — ironically a concept of Christian vintage. In the Muslim world, as Sadakat Kadri reminds us in Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Sharia Law, “prosecutions for blasphemy” have been “extremely infrequent in the historical record”. Indeed, in their last 1,400 years of existence, Muslim societies have for the better part done without them. It is no accident that the first time blasphemy rears its head in the Muslim world is in Eighties Pakistan, under the Islamicising rule of General Zia-ul-Haq; Bradford, and Yorkshire more generally, boasts a significant Pakistani Muslim population.

The very first year of Zia’s rule — 1978 — saw the release of a hagiobiopic celebrating the carpenter Ilm-ud-Din, widely regarded as South Asia’s first modern blasphemy murderer. Hung aged 20 in 1929 for killing a Hindu publisher who brought out a book apparently blaspheming the Prophet, Ilm-ud-Din languished in relative posthumous obscurity until Zia passed a slate of blasphemy laws. These days, Ilm-ud-Din is revered as a martyr, as I recently learnt at his Lahore shrine. This was the milieu that bred resentment, not the real theological dispute at heart of Rushdie’s novel — the titular “Satanic verses”. Of doubtful historicity, in this narrative of early Islam, Muhammad proclaims a revelation demanding the adoption of three polytheistic deities, but later recants as having been of “Satanic suggestion”. But it was not this, nor the two other prosaic but blasphemous details in Rushdie’s novel (that the Prophet Abraham was called a bastard, and that his wives were depicted as prostitutes) that mobilised Yorkshire’s Muslims.

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What they really wanted was to have their country’s blasphemy laws extended to Muslims as well; at the time, they only covered Anglican beliefs. It was, in short, a very British demand. The debate has since died down, if only because blasphemy laws were abolished in 2008 in England and Wales, and in 2024 Scotland, where they were replaced by a hate crime law that is, by all accounts, as ecumenical as it is Orwellian (the lineage is telling: hate crime laws are, properly speaking, the blasphemy laws of today). Across the pond, too, it is the new lexicon of hate speech that has animated the most sustained assaults on the First Amendment — some of it with good reason (in a world of swastikas and fasces, it would be churlish to be a free speech absolutist), some of it patently not. Hadi Matar only represents the more extreme, extrajudicial end of the hate speech spectrum. But distrust of the marketplace of ideas is a common enough reflex in our time.

The current obsession with hate speech and cancel culture owes to two developments. The first is the retrenchment of the authoritarian state, the second the retrenchment of the church in the West. Both effectively passed the business of policing opinions from the hands of Big Brother-style governments and God’s earthly mediators to crusading individuals. This is just as John Stuart Mill predicted would transpire in the age of democracy. “Society can and does execute its own mandates,” he wrote, by imposing conformity on the non-conforming — or the “eccentric” as Mill called them. And the cancelling of “eccentricity” isn’t a singularly Left-wing phenomenon. Take the cancelling of Palestinian novelists, artists, and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic since the war. Or, for that matter, the Kulturkampf playing out in American universities. One study has revealed that out of 1,080 attempts made to cancel academics since 2000, just over half — 52% — were made by the Left. The rest were the work of Right-wing snowflakes.

If the likes of Hadi Matar are more visible in this intolerant landscape, it is for two reasons. The first — the obvious — is the act itself. Knifing novelists is both unusual and unhinged, so newsworthy on at least two counts. The second is his chosen idiom. That he plumped for Islam tells us more about the poverty of 21st-century radicalism than anything else. Time was such energies were channelled into avowedly progressive causes. Think the Weather Underground, Brigate Rosse, the Baader Meinhof Group. These days, a young chap itching for the violent overthrow of the ruling dispensation isn’t exactly spoilt for choice. To some migrant youths, or more accurately some youths of migrant extraction, the attraction of Islam isn’t feasibly resisted. It helps that their communities are often the only pious holdouts in an increasingly godless world: West Africans and South Asians in Britain; Maghrebis in France. For French orientalist Olivier Roy, what we have witnessed since the end of the Cold War, then, is the “Islamicisation of radicalism”, and not, as it were, the radicalisation of Islam.

Rushdie, poor chap, has fallen victim to the zeitgeist. His efforts to fight so valiantly against it are, of course, nothing short of heroic. Now, more so than ever, he has become the metonym for free speech. Yet one wonders how justified this honour is. “Language was my knife,” he observes in Knife, “the knife I could use to fight back.” A great sentiment, surely, though in the paragraph that follows Rushdie lets on that he’s unsure of its efficacy: “but was that just a consoling lie I was telling myself?”

The “intimate encounter” with Matar prompts some tormented reflection: “Why didn’t I fight? Why didn’t I run? I just stood there like a piñata and let him smash me.” These are questions that ought to have dogged him much sooner. In 1990, far from being a martyr for free speech, Rushdie rushed to apologise to Khomeini, loudly affirming his Muslim faith. Later, he went as far to implore his publisher, Viking, to halt the publication of The Satanic Verses in paperback. It’s only because none of this cut any ice with the Iranians that Rushdie returned to free speech. It was left to others to take one for the team. The following year, Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tsukuba; his Italian translator, too, was stabbed in Milan, though he survived. Rushdie meanwhile got to make jokes about “fatwa sex” on Curb Your Enthusiasm, as he set about accruing a bevy of spouses, as if a male Zsa Zsa Gabor.

If Rushdie hasn’t quite lived up to the hopes invested in him, his liberal critics have even less to recommend them. Indeed, compared to them, Rushdie shines like a beacon of moral clarity. Liberal uneasiness with free speech is proverbial. The Royal Society of Literature, for instance, refused point blank to condemn Matar. Here’s Bernardine Evaristo, its president: “the society cannot take sides in writers’ controversies and issues, but must remain impartial”. Rushdie spelled it out with greater clarity: “Just wondering if the Royal Society of Literature is ‘impartial’ about attempted murder?”

It would be too simple to pin down liberal equivocation to a generational quirk — that the young are woke and spineless, whereas the old are unwoke and tough as nails. Not so. Just a cursory glance at the roll call of Rushdie’s detractors at the time of The Satanic Verses should disabuse us of such notions. John Le Carré in the Guardian: “I don’t think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity.” Jimmy Carter in the New York Times: Rushdie’s book was “a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.” Hugh Trevor-Roper in the Independent: “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.” George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury: “we must be more tolerant of Muslim anger.”

None of them, it hardly needs saying, were Islamists. Yet they were, on balance, more sympathetic to Rushdie’s “Islamist” detractors than to Rushdie himself. Perhaps there is nothing “Islamist” about the Rushdie-hating Islamists in the first place. Perhaps this was never really a battle between Western liberalism and intolerant Islam, but rather between — as Rushdie puts it in Knife — “those with a sense of humour and those without one”. And the latter, it must be said, are a homegrown menace.

We might see this as a cautionary tale for our times. After all, it isn’t only Turco-Mongol conquerors who find themselves punished for Quran-burning. Last week, the Danish parliament voted to ban the desecration of all religious texts following a spate of protests in which copies of the Qur’an had been destroyed. Inevitably, the new law has been couched as a safety measure. This burning of the book, claims justice minister Peter Hummelgaard, “harms Denmark and Danish interests, and risks harming the security of Danes abroad and here at home”.

He has a point. Even unconfirmed accusations of Quran-burning can be sufficient to prompt extremist violence. In 2015, being accused of defiling the holy book, Farkhunda Malikzada was beaten to death by a ferocious mob in Afghanistan while bystanders, including police officers, did nothing to intervene. Many filmed the brutal murder on their phones and the footage was widely shared on social media. In 2022, a mentally unstable man called Mushtaq Rajput was similarly accused and tied to a tree and stoned to death in Pakistan. Earlier this year in Iran, it was reported that Javad Rouhi was tortured so severely that he could no longer speak or walk. He was sentenced to death for apostasy and later died in prison under suspicious circumstances.

But while we might anticipate that the desecration of the Quran would be proscribed in Islamic theocracies, it is troubling to see similar laws being passed in secular nations such as Denmark. The government had not been so faint-hearted when faced with similar problems in 2005. After cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Jyllands-Posten, a global campaign from Indonesia to Bosnia demanded that the Danish authorities take action. The government stood firm and the judicial complaint against the newspaper was dismissed.

In a free society this is the only justifiable response, albeit one that takes considerable courage. And the climate of intimidation that has descended since is a product of our collective failure to defend freedom of speech against the demands of militants. When the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, one would have hoped for a unified front on behalf of one of our finest writers. Instead, much of the literary and political establishment abandoned or even censured him. In the Australian television show Hypotheticals, the singer Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens, implied that he would have no objections to Rushdie being burned alive.

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That a work of fiction such as The Satanic Verses could not even be published today gives us some indication of the extent to which we have forsaken the principle of free speech. If we are so squeamish about the burning of Qurans, why were so many of us indifferent to the burning of Rushdie’s book on the streets of Bolton and Bradford? Yusuf Islam’s remark about the author’s immolation might have been flippant but, as Heinrich Heine famously wrote: “Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people too.”

The ceremonial burning of books in Germany and Austria in the Thirties has ensured that the act will always have a unique charge, and a disquieting, visceral effect. It is why, for instance, the most memorable scene in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan is when the villain Steerpike sets fire to his master’s library. It is a gesture designed to repudiate the very heights of human achievement, to hurl his victim into a spiral of despair. When Rushdie saw his own novel publicly incinerated, he confessed to feeling that “now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible”.

The burning of the Quran leaves many of us similarly troubled. We do not need to approve of the contents to sense that the destruction of a book is symbolic of a desire to limit the scope of human thought. When activists post footage of themselves gleefully setting fire to copies of Harry Potter, one cannot shake the similar suspicion that they would happily substitute the books with the author herself.

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But while many of us find the burning of books instinctively rebarbative, to outlaw this form of protest is essentially authoritarian. And to reinstate blasphemy laws by specifying that only religious books are to be protected is fundamentally retrograde. Of course, such laws already exist in most Western countries in an unwritten form. In March, a 14-year-old autistic boy was suspended from his school in Wakefield, reported to the police, and received death threats after he accidentally dropped a copy of the Quran on the floor, causing some of the pages to be scuffed. He may not have committed a crime, but many people behaved as though he had.

And the same unwritten laws are in force in the fact that few would be brave enough to publish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed after the massacre at the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. Five years later, the schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded on the streets of Paris simply for showing the offending images during a lesson on free speech. Closer to home, a teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire is still in hiding after showing the images to his pupils and stirring the ire of a righteous mob.

The failure of the school’s headmaster, as well as the teaching unions, to support this man against the demands of religious fundamentalists is revealing. Why must those who claim to be defending the dignity of Muslims treat them as irascible children? At the same time, as Sam Harris recently pointed out, there is an oddity in the fact that so many Muslims do not appear to be alarmed that “their community is so uniquely combustible”.

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The bitter reality is that terrorism works, particularly when so many governments across the Western world are seemingly willing to fritter away our bedrock of liberal values. This has been actuated, in part, by an alliance of two very different forms of authoritarianism: ultra-conservative Islamic dogma and the safetyist ideology of “wokeness”. The latter has always claimed that causing offence is a form of violence, and the former has been quick to adopt the same tactics. This is why protesters outside Batley Grammar School asserted that the display of offensive cartoons was a “safeguarding” issue, and the Muslim Council of Britain criticised the school for not maintaining an “inclusive space”. The same censorious instincts have been updated, and are now cloaked in a more modish language.

In a civilised and pluralistic society, the burning of a holy book might provoke a variety of responses — anger, disbelief, or just a shrug of the shoulders — but it should never lead to violence. Back when The Onion still had some bite, the website satirised this “unique combustibility” through the depiction of a graphic sexual foursome between Moses, Jesus, Ganesha and Buddha. The headline said it all: “No One Murdered Because Of This Image”.

Freedom of speech and expression still matters, and if that means a few hotheads and mini-Tamburlaines might burn their copies of the Quran then so be it. It is unfortunate that we have reached the point where Islam must be ring-fenced from ridicule or criticism, whether due to fear of violent repercussions or a misguided and patronising effort to promote social justice. But for this state of affairs we ultimately have only ourselves to blame, and in particular our tendency to capitulate to religious zealots when they seek exemption from the liberal consensus.

It seems almost certain that more blood will be spilled in the West over blasphemy. Meanwhile, with each new “affair”, the noose around expression is tightened, and people take greater pains to err on the right side of the assassin’s veto. This means that, in effect, well-meaning people and institutions come to accept the logic of the fatwa, but the more we accept it, the lower the bar for extremist allegations drops and, perversely, the more likely violence becomes.

As a new blasphemy controversy bubbles away in Sweden, I wanted to isolate and examine the particular strand of Islamist violence aimed at those perceived to have blasphemed. For the Counter Extremism Project, I identified 71 successful attacks, plots and threat campaigns against individuals or institutions believed to have insulted Islam or the Prophet. (It’s likely there are more.) There are distinct phases to the violence, starting with the years-long global campaign of assassinations and bombings connected to The Satanic Verses. Like a pharaonic curse, catastrophe strikes those connected to the book one by one: bookshops are bombed in London, California and New York; an imam is assassinated in Brussels; a man blows himself up preparing a bomb in a Paddington hotel.

The recurring theme of this first wave of violence is the complete abyss of information. Few suspects are ever charged and, despite the ferocity of the incidents, this suggests there is a professionalism to the attacks, rather than mere anger and opportunism. The CIA was under few illusions about who was behind it, in 1992 reporting that “Iran has shifted from attacking organisations affiliated with the novel — publishing houses and bookstores — to individuals involved in its publication, as called for in the original fatwa”.

In 1991, the novel’s Italian translator was stabbed multiple times but survived, while the Japanese translator was not so lucky: Hitoshi Igarashi was killed in a stabbing frenzy outside his office at Tsukuba university. In 1993, Rushdie’s Norwegian publisher and defender, William Nygaard, was shot and left for dead, requiring months in hospital. The single worst act of violence unfolded that same year, in Turkey, where a secularist activist who translated excerpts of the novel was targeted by a riled-up mob, which set the Madimak hotel ablaze. Their target, Aziz Nesin, escaped the inferno, but 37 innocents did not.

Later, in the early 2000s, Europe’s emerging jihadist movement took up the mantle of the defence of Islam and the Prophet. The first warning signs were the targeting of San Petronio Basilica in Bologna, home to a 15th-century depiction of Muhammad. In Amsterdam, in 2004, one of Europe’s very first dealings with domestic jihadist terror was also the continent’s first exposure to jihadist blasphemy violence: the murder of Theo van Gogh. With Ayaan Hirsi Ali, he had created a film that portrayed verses from the Quran on the naked bodies of women. For this, he was stabbed, shot and nearly decapitated in broad daylight by a 24-year-old named Mohammed Bouyeri, who afterwards plunged a letter saturated with religious fury into his victim’s chest.

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Bouyeri was part of a Dutch network of Salafi jihadists, which, according to his contemporary Jason Walters, was gripped by internal division over whether to focus on proselytising at home, travelling to fight American occupiers in Iraq, or launching attacks in Europe. Bouyeri unilaterally ended the debate with van Gogh’s assassination, after which authorities broke up the network. Walters tells me that even among those who opposed attacks, the murder of van Gogh was deemed legitimate (if strategically disastrous): the filmmaker had insulted Islam.

The following year, Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in an experimental commentary on freedom of speech relating to Islam. Global unrest ensued, claiming some 200 lives. Closer to home, the impact of the cartoons affair cannot be overstated. As the data shows, plots and attacks targeting Jyllands-Posten or individual cartoonists in Denmark lasted almost a decade, until civil war in Syria grabbed the attention of Europe’s Islamists and jihadists. In fact, during the mid-2000s to 2010s, Denmark, with just six million inhabitants, was targeted more often than the United States, the traditional enemy of al-Qaeda. Denmark and Sweden were also disproportionately affected by departures for Islamic State, years later — a fact that dismantles the myth that Scandinavian countries do not suffer homegrown jihadist radicalisation due to their egalitarianism and lack of either colonial history or adventurist foreign policy.

Some of these plots were directed from overseas, such as the 2009 plans by Pakistani-American 40-something David Headley. Headley, who previously helped orchestrate the 2008 Mumbai massacre, wanted to take hostages inside Jyllands-Posten and throw severed heads from the windows to the street below. But plenty of plots were homegrown: domestic jihadists deemed the “covenants of security” with their host nations were null and void, because the cartoons constituted acts of war against Islam.

This interpretation of blasphemy is recurrent: addressing the Danish cartoons, Osama bin Laden declared that the West’s killing of Muslim women and children paled in comparison to Jyllands-Posten’s crimes: “This is the more serious tragedy,” he said in an audio message, “and the reckoning will be more severe.” Likewise, the first issue of al-Qaeda’s English language magazine made clear that killing one of the cartoonists would be an even “greater cause than fighting for Palestine, Afghanistan or Iraq”.

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Similarly exaggerated equivalences have reappeared in later affairs. The man who led the campaign of accusations against Samuel Paty, the teacher who was beheaded after showing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class on free speech, warned that “tolerating” Paty’s actions could lead to a Srebrenica for French Muslims. Indeed, even a UK-registered charity mentioned the genocide of Rohingya Muslims and a Batley schoolteacher showing a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, in the same breath.

Delving into the nature of the plots is revealing. As much as jihadist violence is associated with mass casualty attacks, discriminate violence targeted at blasphemers or other perceived enemies of Islam account for a large share of total terror plots, prior to Isis. When those targets are identified, the violence is excessive and notably vicious, even by jihadist standards. Theo van Gogh was, to use the words of Ian Buruma, “slaughtered like a sacrificial animal”, for instance.

In these attacks, the violence goes well beyond the infliction of death, which can just as well be achieved by a single bullet. It is designed to humiliate, degrade and punish transgressors through extreme violence and dismemberment. For all the apparent “tradecraft”, the same characteristics can be observed among Iranian assassins in the early Satanic Verses campaign. In Britain, the pitiless stomping to death of a former imam in Rochdale accused of black magic, and the knifing of a Glaswegian shopkeeper by a follower of Pakistan’s spiralling anti-blasphemy movements, are results of the same frenzied violence.

It is this increasingly animated blasphemy fervour, emanating from Pakistan, that Britain cannot afford to ignore, given that Iranian operations and jihadist plots continue on British soil. It is the underlying force behind the controversies involving the Batley schoolteacher; last summer’s protests outside Cineworld screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a British-made epic that became the first film to show the “face” of the Prophet Muhammad; and the more recent “Quran-scuffing” incident in a Wakefield school.

In fact, clashes like these, as well as highly discriminate violence, may come to characterise the post-Isis era. Compared with the model of violence unleashed at Manchester Arena and the Bataclan, violence against “blasphemers” inspires a much wider constituency of sympathisers, apologists and relativists — precisely the oxygen terrorism needs to survive. This apologia has, at times, even extended well into the Western media. Terrorists learn, and they will not have overlooked the massive global controversy which followed the killing of Paty. In short, blasphemy violence is not only righteous and obligatory, it better serves the interests of the various extremists competing and jostling as defenders of Islam.

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Admittedly, the story of blasphemy violence is not limited to attacks, which are merely the most visible and visceral part of the equation. Nor is the story of blasphemy violence simply one of intentionally vulgar and offensive cartoons, the loss of which from the public square few commentators will mourn. The Jewel of Medina was a historical novel, which lost its publisher. The Lady of Heaven was a film made by Muslims for Muslims, yet was pulled from British cinemas. The professor who lost her job was teaching a masterpiece of Persian art.

And these are just the cases we know of. Every book never written, every painting never painted, every critique never voiced and every historical inquiry never made: that is the true story of blasphemy violence.

Amis’s own clique — Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Clive James — were a formidably talented bunch of wits and whiz kids, almost all of them products of Oxbridge in an era of intense cultural creativity, the Sixties and Seventies. Between them they have produced superlative fiction, caustic satire, and devastating humour. Hitchens, who wrote that the life of the “poxed and suppurating” John F. Kennedy was remarkable not for being cut short but for lasting so long, described Prince Charles (as he was then) as a “morose, bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts”. Ian Fleming was “a heavy sadist and narcissist and all-round pervert” with a particular penchant for the human bottom.

Hitchens’s spiritual twin, Martin Amis, easily matched him for mordant wit. He was the great poet of the postmodern metropolis, his finger unerringly on the pulse of its hardboiled, streetwise, sexually libidinous inhabitants. His sensibility belonged as exactly to its time and place as that of Dickens or Faulkner. We are ushered into a depthless, deregulated world of appetite, self-interest, and purely vacuous freedom in which anything goes, held together only by the rigour of literary style. Style in Amis is what rises triumphantly above the squalor of his material. Its shapeliness, equipoise and finesse constitute an implicit critique of contemporary culture, which saved him from anything as uncool as having to pass explicit moral judgements on it. He once remarked that he would sell his grandmother for a finely turned phrase, and if I were his grandmother I would have taken this comment seriously enough to go into hiding. In a literary milieu in which style is sometimes considered “elitist”, few modern writers can handle a sentence so superbly.

Part of Amis knew this frenetically consumerist culture from the inside, while an alter ego submitted it to savagely entertaining satire in the name of a moral norm which is present only by its absence. His fiction thus refutes the old cliché that satire requires a stable standard by which to judge. If anything goes, however, nothing has value — not even shock-value, which is why calling a book Dead Babies smacked of clamouring for attention in an offence-proof world. The great modernist writers had the good fortune to confront a readership that was still eminently shockable. Indeed, the title Dead Babies would have been unthinkable in the Sixties, only a decade before the book appeared. In a postmodern world where the monstrous and psychopathic are routine, Amis didn’t have the modernists’ advantage. This was a civilisation in which nothing could be said, which was both the object of his satire and a source of his endless verbal fertility.

There’s a disparity in Amis’s writing between the sordid or macabre events it narrates and the tamely conventional views which silently underpin it. It’s a discrepancy which is true in different ways of Rushdie and McEwan. These writers portray a late-capitalist world which shows up the bankruptcy of liberal values, yet they have no real alternative to such values themselves. Like most liberals, they are nervous of convictions and commitments, which appear them as dogmatism and soulless system. (When Boris Johnson was asked in an interview whether he had any convictions, he replied warily that he had picked up one or two for speeding.) Amis dismissed socialism and Christianity as obsolete ideologies, but in his view all ideologies were obsolete. Except, of course, middle-class liberalism, which is no more than plain common sense. One of Clive James’s favourite slogans was “pas de zele”, though one imagines that his aversion to ardour didn’t apply to opposing General Strikes.

The contemporary world is divided between those who believe too much (Islamists, for example) and those who believe too little (the metropolitan literati). It was logical, then, that when Islamism struck in New York on 9/11, having first invaded the London literary world in the shape of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, Rushdie should wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes, apparently unconcerned by the fact that 30 years to the day before 9/11, the USA overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile and installed in its place an odious dictator who proceeded to murder far more people than died in the World Trade Centre.

Martin Amis’s response to the tragedy was more discreditable. The Muslim community would have to suffer, he suggested, and Muslims — even entirely innocent ones — should be hounded and harassed, with deportation further down the line. This, we should note, was the view of a liberal. God knows what retribution the far-Right were dreaming up. Amis’s vile pronouncement exposed the limits of liberalism, which can move quickly into a violent defence of the status quo. Christopher Hitchens mounted a shabbily disingenuous defence of his old chum, claiming that Amis had merely been engaged in a “thought experiment”. It’s remarkable how Hitchens’s much-sung passion for truth and justice failed to extend to his literary cronies.

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Martin Amis knew the horror of words

By David Patrikarakos

All of the Amis coterie launch their critiques of contemporary culture from a privileged position within it. As a young journalist, Hitchens was the ultimate champagne socialist, though as his career progressed the champagne gradually took over from the socialism. His desire to belabour the Establishment was matched only by his eagerness to belong to it. A practising Trotskyist at Oxford (though he never really practised enough to get good at it), he ended up admiring George Bush, dining with the architects of Western butchery in Iraq and generally cosying up to the neocons. James Fenton also began his adult life as a Leftist revolutionary before leaving such infantile fantasises well behind him.

These aren’t just biographical issues, but they aren’t to be mistaken for literary judgements either. The relation between politics and letters is more complex than that, as a glance at the great modernist writers would suggest. Joseph Conrad was a deep-dyed conservative and misogynist with a virulent hatred of the political Left. Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis supported the fascist cause, while W.B. Yeats, a champion of plans to stop the poor from breeding, flirted with fascism as well. D.H. Lawrence was racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic, while T.S. Eliot was a high Tory who championed a quasi-fascistic French movement. Yet all of these figures were radicals — radicals of the Right rather than the Left — and the fineness of their work is related to the depth and breadth of their challenge to a liberal democracy in profound crisis. Besides, there were plenty of modernist experiments on the political Left as well.

Almost all of these writers thought deeply about politics, philosophy and the shape of a whole civilisation, which is hardly true of Clive James. Some of them were powerful visionaries, which is not quite how one would describe Julian Barnes or Ian McEwan. This is one reason why their work, taken as a whole, has never been equalled in the century or so which has passed since it appeared, and certainly not by the Amis group. It’s surely no accident that the finest artist among the latter, Salman Rushdie, has moved between different cultures, idioms. and literary forms like so many modernist authors before him, transcending provincial pieties and decencies.

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As for Amis, he and I crossed swords once or twice in public, not least because of what I took to be his slur on a whole people. But he spoke in a moment of panic and withdrew his words later, though as far as I know he never apologised to those he had offended. He was a fabulously gifted writer, and though I never met him (he wouldn’t share a TV studio with me) his relatively early death is a sore loss to the republic of letters.

These were the exceptions rather than the rule in the cultural establishment. For the most part, there was an early dislike of Thatcher that rapidly hardened into hatred. She was, said TV dramatist Dennis Potter, “the most obviously repellent manifestation of the most obviously arrogant, divisive and dangerous British government since the war”. Or, in the words of Jonathan Miller, she “was loathsome, repulsive in almost every way, with her odious suburban gentility and sentimental, saccharine patriotism”.

No previous prime minister had attracted these levels of opprobrium, but more striking still was that she exerted such a strong cultural fascination even before reaching Downing Street. There were jokes about her in sitcoms such as George and Mildred and Fawlty Towers when she was leader of the opposition, and she warranted a mention in Linton Kwesi Johnson’s 1978 poem “It Dread Inna Inglan”: “Maggie Thatcher — on she goes with a racist show, but she has to go.” She went on to set a modern record both for the length of her premiership and for the number of negative appearances she made in comedy and music.

Part of the dislike came from the fact that Thatcher herself appeared so little interested in the world of culture. She was, said Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen’s Music, a “stupid mindless Philistine”. Even the former Labour MP Woodrow Wyatt, a friend and devotee, who liked to think of himself as an eminently civilised man, concluded sadly: “She has no taste.”

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By Alwyn W. Turner

That wasn’t quite right. As a teenager, she’d been a regular cinema-goer, dreaming of dancing like Ginger Rogers and enthusiastically reviewing the movies she’d seen in letters to her older sister. (“I can’t say I liked it,” she noted of the 1941 adaptation of Love on the Dole.) But her taste never seemed to develop much further.

As an adult, she had better things to do, and the arts were strictly peripheral in her life. She was a guest on Desert Island Discs in 1978, and opted for obvious pieces by Beethoven, Dvorak and Verdi. A decade later, when she was asked about her favourite books, she said she was currently re-reading Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Fourth Protocol, a novel in which she herself featured (favourably, in this instance). The impression was that she didn’t know much, and cared slightly less. She was more clear about what she didn’t like; she dismissed Francis Bacon as “that artist who paints those horrible pictures”, which may have been the truth but wasn’t the whole truth.

It was all so appallingly middle-brow and — to use that insult of Miller’s — suburban: the most damning of all adjectives in British cultural circles. To make things worse, she disapproved of state funds being used to prop up uneconomic businesses and made no exception for the arts. After all, Andrew Lloyd-Webber was a man of the theatre and he managed to stand on his own two feet without relying on government hand-outs. “Why can’t you be more like Andrew?” she demanded of Hall, who was beginning to regret his 1979 vote. As Jim Hacker said in her favourite TV show, Yes, Minister: “Why should the rest of the country subsidise the pleasures of the middle-class few?” For her enemies, this wasn’t a culture war so much as a war on culture.

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As was sometimes the case with Thatcher, however, the rhetoric was not matched by reality. During her time in office, spending by the Arts Council in England and Wales increased by over 20% in real terms. (It fell slightly in Scotland.) There were major new initiatives, as well. One of the biggest projects of recent decades — the building of the British Library — was undertaken on her watch, and there was also the introduction, after decades of lobbying, of the Public Lending Rights scheme, which rewarded writers when their books were borrowed from public libraries.

And then there was Channel 4, launched in 1982 and charged with catering for minority tastes and interests. Jeremy Isaacs, the chief executive of the new channel, understood this as meaning “minorities” in a Ken Livingstone kind of way. “Should black Britons, should the young, should feminists, should homosexuals see themselves, canvass their ideas, on television?” he said. “I see no reason why not. They are of this society, not outside it.” That wasn’t what the government meant. “You’ve got it all wrong,” the Employment Secretary Norman Tebbit told Isaacs. “Golf and sailing and fishing. Hobbies. That’s what we intended.”

It was too late, and the new channel became in its early years a beacon of anti-Thatcherism, giving a platform — among others — to alternative comedians, who suited both the tone of the channel and its tight budgets. Altogether, noted The Times, Channel 4 was “just the sort of thing to inflame that school of opinion, so strong in the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, which believes that the Left is in control of the nation’s television”.

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The same law of unintended consequence also operated in Tebbit’s most substantial contribution to the arts. As the dole queues lengthened to three million and more, he launched the Enterprise Allowance Scheme under the slogan: “Inside every unemployed person, there’s a self-employed one.” If you’d been unemployed for at least 13 weeks and could find £1,000 of capital (possibly in the form of a bank loan), then the government would pay you £40 a week for a year to get a business started. The income was tax-free and was substantially higher than the current rate of unemployment benefit.

The intended recipients were the self-employed; plumbers and window-cleaners were the oft-cited examples, and it was reported that an early trial had helped “such diverse activities as a kissogram service, a hang-gliding school, a private detective agency and a lampshade manufacturer”. But there were also applications from people working in the creative industries. In 1984 a group from Solihull, Eye Do It, became the first pop band to release a single under the scheme, with “I Lost My Mind”. That didn’t make much impact, but others were more successful, including artists Tracey Emin and Rachel Whiteread and comedians Alan Davies, Harry Enfield and Sean Lock.

Inadvertently, Tebbit had turned into one of the great patrons of culture in modern Britain. Again, though, there was little gratitude on display. “We weren’t children of Thatcher; we hated her,” insisted McGee. Viz comic, on the other hand, which was another beneficiary of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, always seemed to have an ironic affection for her; as late as 2009 it pictured her on a “True Blue” cover of Playboy magazine with the headline: “Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Tits Out! Out! Out!”

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The cultural antipathy to Thatcher continued throughout her premiership, but it changed as it went on. The evolving mood was captured most concisely in pop music. Her first term saw the high point of Rock Against Racism and of protest songs. Mass unemployment produced the riposte of UB40’s “One in Ten” (1981) and the Specials’ “Do Nothing” (1980). The B-side of the latter was a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm”, which had gained a new relevance: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more.” The Beat went with the more direct “Stand Down, Margaret” (1980).

She didn’t heed that advice, and after her re-election in 1983, the tone became more fearful, with a spate of anti-nuclear hit singles by Iron Maiden, Culture Club, Sting and Genesis. The real trend, though, was away from politics and towards charity. The Live Aid concert in 1985 featured Paul Weller’s band the Style Council performing politically engaged songs “Walls Come Tumbling Down” and “Internationalists”, but the central impulse was one that chimed perfectly with Thatcher’s espousal of Victorian values of faith, self-help and charity. Elsewhere, the most memorable song directly addressing Thatcher in 1985 was the Exploited’s punk anthem “Maggie”, not so much a protest as a howl of impotent rage: “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, you fucking cunt!”

And then, as the years wore on and on, a sense of fatalism descended. Thatcher looked immovable and the fantasies started of her death: the Blow Monkeys’ “(Celebrate) The Day After You” (1987), Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down” (1989), Morrissey’s “Margaret on the Guillotine” (1988). There was still a visceral hatred, but no hope, just a weariness. A decade after she left office, the same theme was to be found in “Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher” in Billy Elliott: The Musical (2000), cheerfully celebrating that we were “one day closer to your death”. On 8 April 2013, the day she actually died, the audience at the show was asked if it should be excluded from the night’s performance; overwhelmingly, they opted for it to be left in.

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And still, the cultural fascination continues. In the forthcoming movie Reagan, Lesley-Anne Downe will become the latest in a long line of actresses to give us their Margaret, which can be traced all the way back to Janet Brown in the James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only (1981). Best known was Meryl Streep’s incarnation in The Iron Lady (2011), which in turn inspired the pornographic satire The Iron Lady Garden (2012), with Rebecca More as Aggie Snatcher.

It’s been a long, strange affair, this relationship of Thatcher with the arts. She knew it sort of mattered, which is why, in her first conference speech as Tory leader in 1975, she denounced “those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved gloom, oppression and failure”. (The context made it clear that she was talking specifically about the BBC.) But it wasn’t really important enough, and there were so many other dragons to be slain.

So while she was busily rewriting the political norms on public ownership, trade unions and the economy, she was losing all the cultural arguments. And since cultural artefacts have a longer shelf-life than do inflation rates, they have increasingly shaped the memory of Thatcher. The further we get away from her, the more public attitudes are shaped by hostile depictions of her and her policies. She still looms large, even for those born after her defenestration in 1990, but she’s seen more and more negatively.

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It is worth remembering, though, that when it really mattered, Thatcher’s instincts were absolutely sound. For most of the Eighties, Salman Rushdie was one of the loudest voices of condemnation. Hers were “the politics of the Victorian nursery”, he mocked, and in The Satanic Verses (1988) he referred to her as “Maggie the Bitch”. That was the book that saw Iran offer a $6 million bounty to anyone who would kill Rushdie. In the ensuing tumult, Thatcher saw only a simple principle. “It is a fundamental matter of freedom of speech,” she said. Whatever else she thought about the role of the state, she was sure that one of its duties was the protection of its citizens from foreign governments, and for the best part of a decade — until he withdrew it — Rushdie was given full-time police protection.

He and she only ever met once, at Scotland Yard. Given their very different characters, it seemed unlikely that they could ever find a personal rapport, but somehow a connection was made. “She was very touchy-feely,” remembered Rushdie. “She was, like, pawing at me, and I thought, ‘I’m being groped by the Prime Minister!’”

If anything, Victory City feels like Sin City — cartoonishly brutal, emotionally stunted, jarringly anachronistic. There’s the usual parade of deities and elephants. But peel away the exoticism and one is left with a useful history lesson. For too long, pre-colonial India has been a tabula rasa for both nationalist and liberal projections. It was, Rushdie reminds us, no golden age.

For India’s Hindu supremacists today, the Vijayanagara empire was a land of cow’s milk and saffron-infused honey, a Hindu holdout in the Muslim Deccan, where Art and Culture, solemnly graced with capital letters, flourished unhindered by the depredations of the barbarians at the gates. (Those barbarians, of course, are all mascaraed Muslim men flaunting their philistinism, their many wives and their dextrosinistral script.) Queasily sharing a bed with the supremacists are liberals given to an allied fantasy, that pre-colonial Indian kingdoms were pristine, perfect societies, unsullied by contact with the West; that it took the Brits to cow a self-respecting people into submission.

Both are bovine delusions that Rushdie sends up in Victory City. His two fictional cow-herding founders of Vijayanagara, the brothers Hukka and Bukka, medieval India’s answer to Romulus and Remus, are apostles of openness. They briefly consider the beliefs of their subjects — “do you think they are circumcised or not circumcised?” — but are then confronted by the impracticability of the task: “Do you want to go down there and ask them all to open their lungis, pull down their pyjamas, unwrap their sarongs?” It’s all too much of a bother. “The truth is I don’t really care.”

Indeed, unlike Narendra Modi, the historical Vijayanagara’s rayas — rulers — weren’t that interested in the faith of the people they lorded it over. Rushdie, of course, gives their toleration a blasé touch, as if they were detached moderns. But the point stands: they may have been rather religious themselves, building temples and adopting deities, but they preferred not to saddle their subjects with their beliefs. Vijayanagara, in fact, was a fairly Islamicised affair, its kings dressing like Muslim rulers, its armies enlisting Muslim strategists and horse traders, its architecture incorporating Muslim motifs — a riot of arches and domes, vaulted arcades and squinches.

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So, rather than a plucky Hindu kingdom standing alone in the South, enisled in a sea of Muslim kingdoms, Vijayanagara was, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from its neighbours. And those neighbours weren’t especially hostile. Bijapur’s Muslim kings, for instance, were not the grim, Sharia-obsessed, humourless, Isis types of lore, but rather, like Hukka and Bukka, a largely tolerant bunch. Hindu gods were halal, as were erotic miniatures.

War made quick work of religious distinctions in the real world. Vijayanagara’s rayas were men of fickle loyalties, siding with Bijapur against (also Muslim) Ahmadnagar at one time, and with Ahmadnagar against Bijapur at another. The corollary was also true: the Hindu Gajapati empire was once a sworn enemy of Vijayanagara. And according to the latter empire’s foremost historian, Burton Stein, its rayas registered their biggest military successes against the Hindu empires to its south, not the Muslim ones to its north. What’s more, these victories were secured in the main through the recruitment of Muslim mercenaries. In the end, a notionally “Muslim” triple alliance did in Vijayanagara — not because it was a Hindu kingdom, but because it had the temerity to declare war on all three of them.

Rushdie takes aim at the myths of not only the Hindu nationalists but also those of unthinking anti-imperialists. Today, an increasingly common view peddled by American academics has it that the caste system was a British construct, alien to the golden age to which Vijayanagara belonged. It is a view, moreover, that appears to be finding a receptive audience this side of the pond. The BBC, for one, has aired the risible claim of a Temple University geographer that “the pre-colonial written record shows little or no mention of caste”. The Indian polemicist and parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor argued much the same in a puerile Oxford Union performance, before repeating the assertion in the Guardian.

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It’s an assertion that liberals, British as well as Indian, instinctively sympathise with, since it points the finger at the villainy of imperialists and casts the colonised as blameless victims. But it is just as blinkered and anachronistic as the pseudo-histories hawked by Hindu nationalists. As Rushdie rightly shows, and indeed as scores of sensible historians such as Ananya Chakravarti and Rosalind O’Hanlon have argued, caste hierarchy was the organising principle in pre-colonial Indian society. Endogamy was the norm: inter-dining, let alone inter-marriage, was rare to the point of nonexistence.

Rushdie’s allegorical “castes” — crows, owlets, parrots, songbirds — don’t get on. They live as communities apart, much as real castes did in Vijayanagara. Contemporary travellers recorded the wildly different lifestyles of the lower and upper orders, their mutually unintelligible customs. Here’s one of them, observing the consuming passions of the Brahmins, the priestly class, in 1535: “The learned Brahman [has] never married nor ever touched a woman… These people have such devotion to cows that they kiss them every day, some even on the rump, and with the droppings of these cows they absolve themselves from their sins as if with holy water.” He then goes on to describe a ritual associated with “that [low] caste of people called Telagas, amongst whom the wives are buried alive with their husbands when they die”.

Vijayanagara was no liberal utopia, then. It may have been multicultural to a certain extent, but Rushdie carefully avoids falling into the trap of viewing medieval India as a “composite culture”. Secularism was very much work in progress. Violence along religious and caste lines was not absent, and even the peaceful interludes were more of a passive, live-and-let-live business, rather than an active celebration of unity in diversity. As Rushdie shows, medieval India was a deeply divided society long before the arrival of the “foreign pink monkeys”.

Time and again, as in his previous novels The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Enchantress of Florence, toleration proves a false Eden. His latest heroine Pampa Kampana’s “theological laxity” proves elusive. Hindu supremacists take charge, and she is exiled to a forest. But then she returns to usher in a fleeting renaissance, only to be relegated by another Modi-type. The dark ages return. Here, then, is Rushdie’s cyclical interpretation of history: good times follow bad times follow good times follow bad times ad nauseam.

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Above all, his new book paints a picture of life in pre-colonial India that isn’t pretty. As elsewhere, it was nasty, brutish, and short. Victory City opens with mass suicide, an all-too-graphic description of sati, self-immolation, as war widows throw themselves into flames to escape dishonour as their “fourth-rate” empire collapses. Severed heads circulate as if legal tender. A deposed king has his “crownless head” chopped off and filled with straw. These aren’t always magical realist flourishes. Some quick cross-checking reveals that Rushdie has culled many of these gory details from the accounts of two Portuguese travellers, Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes, both of whom feature as prominent characters in Victory City. The latter’s memoir is especially graphic:

“The punishments that they inflict in this kingdom are these: for a thief, whatever theft he commits, howsoever little it be, they forthwith cut off a foot and a hand, and if his theft be a great one he is hanged with a hook under his chin… Nobles who become traitors are sent to be impaled alive on a wooden stake thrust through the belly, and people of the lower orders, for whatever crime they commit, he forthwith commands to cut off their heads in the market-place… These are the common kinds of punishments, but they have others more fanciful; for when the King so desires, he commands a man to be thrown to the elephants, and they tear him in pieces.”

“The past is a foreign country,” wrote L. P. Hartley, “They do things differently there.” Which is to say the past is never pretty. History is full of awkward facts. Fiction, especially good fiction, recognises this. Victory City will upset some liberals, of course, who will find no pre-colonial golden age between its covers. But I suspect it will rile up Hindu supremacists a lot more. As it happens, the villain of the piece in Rushdie’s fictional world is a faux-celibate pandit who has it off with the reluctant heroine, a prepubescent girl possessed by the deity Parvati. In other words, a Hindu goddess is raped by a Hindu priest. Rushdie may have spent the last 30 years of his life hiding from Muslim mullahs, but I fear he’ll have to spend his remaining ones fleeing their Hindu counterparts.

The lines were added by Orson Welles to the script of what would be his final onscreen performance, Someone to Love (1987). The more one dwells on the quote, the more troubling it becomes. It does not belong in the realm of self-help. Instead, it is more akin to Joseph Conrad’s words in Heart of Darkness, “We live as we dream – alone”, words from a scene in which one character cannot convey to others the depths of his experience. He cannot reach them, and, in that moment, a terrible chill can be felt, a vertigo even, that perhaps we are all in the same position, or one day will be and the illusion will no longer hold.

There are few moments where the solitary nature of life appears more inescapable than when one is clinging to it. The author Salman Rushdie lies recovering in an unknown location. His agent, Andrew Wylie, recently outlined the severity of the wounds Rushdie suffered after being attacked at the Chautauqua Institution in August. He has lost his sight in one eye and the use of one of his hands. He has “three serious wounds in his neck” and 15 in his chest. It is astonishing, if not miraculous, that he has survived.

Despite initial media activity around the attempt on his life, attention coursed on to “the next thing”. People seemed to assume that, once stabilised, Rushdie would quietly recover. Even in the presence of medical professionals and loved ones, Salman Rushdie is now, as he has always been, in this struggle alone. He alone will have to endure the aftermath. He has been doing so for decades.

The tendency to adopt him as a cipher for political interests has been lamentable. Rushdie is a fiction writer, albeit a remarkably curious and brave one. The Satanic Verses was rendered prophetic by the unfolding response and wider geopolitical contexts. The influence of the Ayatollahs was significant enough to warrant the author going into hiding, yet their reach had limits for as long as Western democracies held firm on protecting their citizens and enshrining rights, such as freedom of thought and speech, rights obtained through centuries of struggle and protest. Alas that was not the case.

When the fundamentalist Supreme Leader of Iran issued essentially a warrant for Salman Rushdie’s killing, and all who published him, it served as a colossal stress test of rights and protections in Western societies. In places, it began to buckle, with politicians, intellectuals and even fellow writers prevaricating, isolating and even condemning the writer for, in their minds, bringing murder upon himself. In a sense, Rushdie was doing what writers of note have always done — he was venturing out and testing, whether intentionally or not, how sturdy the ice was underfoot. As it turned out, it was more fragile than anyone had admitted, and soon cynics within the West would notice.

Looking back on the War on Terror and its human cost, it may be hard to conceive of the hostility experienced by those who spoke out against it. Millions protested and were effectively ignored. The seeds of an essentialism by which we are increasingly bound (“You are for us or against us”) took root. After the atrocities of September 11, emergency laws to restrict rights were introduced on a temporary basis — we were assured. Questions and debate, the basis of all scientific, philosophical and political enquiry and progress, provoked accusations of treason; we saw this, again, when questions arose over issues like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the origins of Covid-19 and so on. The seeds were planted when Rushdie was forced into hiding.

Writing and publishing may seem insignificant compared to the loss and mutilation of life that has transpired since the fatwa was declared against Rushdie. Yet the world of literature has some impact on the climate in which we all live, think and speak. Two damaging and interconnected developments have emerged — one very quiet and the other very loud.

Even while claiming to address political, social and cultural issues, the publishing industry (risk-averse at the best of times) has drifted more towards the uncontroversial, the orthodox and the solipsistic. With the exception of indie presses, which do much of the talent-spotting and grass roots development for the industry, and the occasional adventurous imprint, publishers have largely pursued a path of acquiescence, rendering themselves increasingly detached from a world that has more stories to tell, issues to face and places to explore than ever. There is certainly the illusion of controversy — the perpetual discovery of sex for instance, the wheeling out of straw men to attack or the time-travelling liberal interventionist attitude towards the complexities of the admittedly brutal historical past.

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Periodically, articles will wonder why fewer and fewer people are reading. But little attention is paid to the echo-chamber of the industry and its remove from how most people actually live. What we can write, even speak of, as authors has, after a century of advancement, demonstrably narrowed. And the first gatekeepers, keeping inconvenient truths or contrary speculative fictions at bay, may well be our publishers.

It is difficult to transplant works from the past into the present day, given our present day has been partly shaped by those works but it is clear however that in terms of the impact it made, the bravery it took, and the freedom it assumed, there will not be another Satanic Verses. There may not be another Victor Hugo or a Nabokov. There may not be the equivalent of any of the books whose court victories broadened what it is we are able to publicly express, giving honest articulation to private thoughts — no Tropic of Cancer, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses. Puritanism now comes couched in the language of protection, which, in fact, was always part of the excuse for shutting down certain thoughts and marking certain lives as obscene. It was always a component of the political tool of erasure; we see this daily with reported bans on all manner of books from Ellison’s Invisible Man to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

There is no denying the fear of crazed fanatics is real and understandable. Long before Rushdie was attacked, his Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death, his Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed but survived, as did his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, who was shot in an assassination attempt. Thirty seven people died when a mob seeking to murder Rushdie’s Turkish translator, Aziz Mesin, set fire to the Madimak Hotel.

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Naturally these crimes had a chilling effect. Yet there is something profoundly dispiriting to see an industry that was in the avant-garde for most of the 20^th century volunteering to become its own censor. Some warned at the time, not least Rushdie’s loyal friend Christopher Hitchens, that submitting to theocratic fascists, the same ones that dissenting women are now courageously facing down in Iran, would only embolden and encourage them. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Rushdie was quoted in The Guardian, “Both John F. Kennedy and Nelson Mandela use the same three-word phrase which in my mind says it all, which is, ‘Freedom is indivisible. You can’t slice it up otherwise it ceases to be freedom.’” By seeking safety, the danger is that publishers have been moving increasingly towards irrelevance and vulnerability.

On the other hand, we have the noisy theatre of political engagement, especially on social media. This appears to be thriving until you realise how performative it is and how centred around the narcissism of small differences. Genuine unorthodox views are increasingly censored, and what it takes to be permanently suspended from Twitter or receive a call to your door from the police under disturbingly broad hate crime grounds appears ever-expanding. While there were notable cases of gloating online, the wave of sympathy for Rushdie was a sign that decency and empathy prevail. Yet, just as with the Je suis Charlie trend, some of the lamentations come from those who have pushed, even legislated, for restriction of speech; those who have applauded writers and academics losing their jobs or being no-platformed for the slightest deviation; those who have recreated an atmosphere of heresy that writers had, one day and not long ago, worked to dismantle.

Salman Rushdie was stabbed as he was about to give a speech, on America as a sanctuary for writers. In 1991, he gave a talk at Columbia University entitled “1,000 Days ‘Trapped Inside a Metaphor'”. In it, he tells us what is at stake, as a warning but also ultimately a statement of wonder, “I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to… my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.”

There will be pity now for Salman Rushdie, as there should be. And there should be support and solidarity for him. Yet what is also necessary is rage and shame that this obscenity was allowed to happen, and that Rushdie faced it ultimately alone, just as writers across the world do in the face of persecution and violence to callously indifferent silence. All of this, Rushdie, and his earlier treatment, warned of. Perhaps it could have been avoided if we all possessed Rushdie’s courage of convictions. Or perhaps safety in numbers is not always successful. Yet it is worth trying, not least because it helps to make the illusion that Welles spoke of more tangible. “Our love and friendship” are not meek passive things. They are a bond that requires courage and, on occasion in their defence, pain, integrity and risk.

Those who wished to shut down freedom of thought and speech have won to an extent but only with the assistance of those who claimed to be its advocates and guardians. If Salman Rushdie and what he is suffering means anything, that squalid victory must be reversed. It may be that Welles and Conrad were right and we are truly unreachable to each other — but, at the same time, we are not alone. For within us, we have as company, like the little cricket of Collodi’s Pinocchio, our conscience. Rushdie deserves, at the very least, rest. The rest of us have not yet earned that right.

But sharing a urinal reminds even warring parties of the humanity they have in common and I suddenly wanted to make a gesture of peace. “Hello, Salman,” I said as we converged on the wash basin. “I have an apology to make.”

I wasn’t going to recant on finding his novels jocose. But I did want to confess to expressing less than unequivocal support for him at the time of the fatwa against The Satanic Verses. Less than unequivocal support didn’t mean thinking he had it coming, as some commentators and even fellow novelists did. I was outraged by the pronouncements against the novel and the threats to Rushdie’s life; but I hadn’t felt I could wholeheartedly endorse the spirit of his apotheosis as champion of free speech.

The argument put forward by John Berger — that Rushdie should have thought harder about the dangers his novel posed to those involved in its translation and dissemination and asked his publishers to “stop producing more or new editions”, if only temporarily — chimed with what I’d been thinking. Berger spoke of a “terrifying righteousness on both sides”, and to me that fairly characterised the Holy War that had broken out between the clerics who wanted the book destroyed and a literary elite for whom its existence had become sacrosanct.

“Elite” is an envious word. You don’t speak about elites if you are in one. And I don’t doubt that a sense of exclusion from a charmed circle of the righteous explains why so many writers who might have been expected to be vocal on Salman Rushdie’s behalf weren’t. The Holy War didn’t only pit the righteous against one another; it pitted people unable to imagine the justice of any position but the one they held. The clerics closed minds, and Rushdie’s coterie of literary admirers closed ranks. Both sides claimed the support of angels.

But the angels arrayed against The Satanic Verses were armed and heaven-bent on destruction, while Rushdie’s angels were only smug, and that should have persuaded me to sing along, if only faintly, with them.

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As we washed our hands, I told Salman that. Coming clean, you see. I also told him I admired his courage in trying to live a normal life and speak up against those who wanted him silenced, a courage that wasn’t diminished by his having 24-hour police protection. That, too, must have taken some living with. He patiently allowed me to unburden my conscience and we shook on it.

It’s nice making friends and had I only been able to find a generous thing to say about his next novel we might have remained friends to this day. As it turned out those were the last warm words we exchanged.

I don’t today, in the light of the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, feel pulled this way and that. Today there is only horror and sorrow and hope for his recovery. One doesn’t have to be a member of a free-speech elite to know that no books should ever be destroyed and no authors attacked for what they write. From the understandably lavish outpourings of praise for Rushdie’s work over the last week, you could form the impression that the attack on him was particularly heinous because it was an attack on genius. But genius is irrelevant to this. It was an attack upon a living soul. And upon living words. The sacrilege would be as great were the injured writer merely mediocre.

“Free speech”, nevertheless, remains a forever self-contradicting concept. “Free” is a weasel word. Nothing is free of consequences, whether seen or unseen. To uphold this person’s absolute freedom we might make unacceptable inroads into someone else’s. Indeed, it would seem that we are able to revere free speech and abominate it in a single breath.

Witness last week’s extraordinary decision by the Pleasance Theatre — a self-proclaimed champion of free expression and scourge of censorship — to pull the comedian Jerry Sadowitz’s show because it “did not align with the theatre’s values”. The Pleasance’s defence of its actions, that Sadowitz had gone too far, has been rightly ridiculed. Championing free speech until it goes too far is not championing free speech. And the theatre seemed to forget that, as this was a Fringe Festival of Alternative Comedy, the platform it had originally granted Sadowitz was necessarily exempt from the usual civic inhibitions: its decision was an assault on the very principle of sacred space, without which there can be no carnivals, circuses, clowns, comedians or, of course, novelists.

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But it’s for requiring a performer’s material to “align with its values” that the Pleasance will long live in infamy. The theatre has not put a bounty on Sadowitz’s head. Cancelling a booking is not the same as a death threat. But demanding alignment with its values puts it in the same camp morally and intellectually as regimes who silence critics of their values. And, at the other extreme, universities and publishing houses who demand conformity with the truisms of the hour.

Until we learn to be more accomplished equestrians, freedom of speech is too hobbled a nag to carry us safely into the uplands of open discourse. We inch along and stumble often. In the meantime, what must be insisted on is that while the offended enjoy the same rights to speak out as the offenders, they do not enjoy more. To be insulted, outraged, hurt, or otherwise assailed by someone else’s words does not confer the privilege of silencing them. Nor is it a university’s job to provide sanctuary from language that does not “align” with its values or those of its students. To the contrary: its most important intellectual function is to teach how to engage with alien ideas and discomfiting emotions. An education that doesn’t prompt radical changes in us is of doubtful value.

It seemed for a number of years that something, somehow, had changed for Salman Rushdie. The fatwa fell silent. Someone had relented or just forgotten. That it had all along been biding its time, awaiting the right moment and the right assassin, is devastatingly depressing. It throws us back into the mouldering inevitabilities of ancient tragedy, where grievances are passed on like the plague and a curse, once made, can never be rescinded. The freedoms we trumpet are an expression of a new hope in a less cruelly fatalistic world. But freedom is a conversation or it’s nothing, and free speech is wasted on us if we won’t take up the challenge to listen freely too.

I rarely burnt actual books: we were too poor to afford a copy of The Satanic Verses. Instead, we wrote the title of the offending novel and the name of its author on cardboard and paper and set them alight. It was comical and pathetic. But we were deadly serious. We thought Ayatollah Khomeini was standing up for Islam against the infidels, bringing down the righteous fury of Allah upon a vile apostate. Had Rushdie been attacked then, I would have celebrated.

In the decades since, I have been a refugee, an atheist and a convert to the highest ideals and values of the West: free speech, freedom of conscience, the emancipation of women, and a free press. When I fled from a forced marriage and made a life in Europe, I was bewitched by the culture of freedom. But I still remember with a shudder my time as a pious believer on the verge of fanaticism. I know all too well how righteousness in the name of Islam motivates those who inflict violence on supposed infidels.

I have always viewed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie as a strange conflict between two very different figures. On the one hand, a novelist, raised in what was once secular Bombay and living in the England of Monty Python’s Life of Brian; a man in love with literature and language, who spent many years on a quest to become a published writer. Salman is an intellectual, a lover of stories, and a teller of tales. When he wrote The Satanic Verses, he was more interested in the theme of migration than in satirising Islam. He was certainly not apolitical, but he resided in the world of books and the imagination, engaging with the real world through fantasy. He did not set out to offend Muslims but simply assumed that supposedly holy events and texts were fair game for artists to play with, just as Western writers engaged freely, both positively and negatively, with Christianity.

And then there was the Ayatollah, a fundamentalist figure who had spent long years of exile in the West before returning to Iran to overthrow the despotic regime of the Shah in 1979. Whenever I read about Khomeini, I get the impression that he fancied himself a successor to the Prophet. He was both deeply arrogant and fanatically fundamentalist: a very dangerous combination. He was also a writer, though his subject matter was the Qur’an and Islamic law. Not for him the freely roaming imagination; his interest in literature was constrained by Islam.

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While Salman sought to capture the entire world in his novels, Khomeini couldn’t escape religion. Almost prophetically, Salman included a Khomeini-like figure in The Satanic Verses. A character called only the Imam, he is also an exile seeking to return to his homeland to overthrow a despot and install his own tyranny. Like Khomeini, the Imam wants to turn back time:

“History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies — progress, science, rights — against which the Imam has set his face. History is a deviation from the Path, knowledge is a delusion, because the sum of knowledge was complete on the day Al-Lah finished his revelation to Mahound [the Muhammad figure in the novel].”

And like Khomeini, the Imam succeeds in his quest and devours the very people who saw him as a messiah against the despot. In this, Salman understood so deeply the nature of the Iranian regime when so many then and now fail to grasp its fanatical, unbending nature. The Western response to the fatwa, as to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, was to negotiate. Then, as now, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the regime. The world of the West and the world of Islamism are totally irreconcilable. The sooner we realise that nothing will appease the fanatics of Tehran, the better able we will be to oppose them.

Just look at the wording of the fatwa itself: “I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth. Whoever is killed in this cause will be a martyr.” This is the language of honour and of sensitivity. Salman has blasphemed — he has insulted the honour of our precious beliefs — and so he, and many others, must die.

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The fatwa is timeless. It won’t die with Khomeini. It is eternal. This is why, when it comes to fighting Islamism, the Western tools of diplomacy and reason are useless. We are faced with an enemy that never gives up, who thinks in terms of centuries rather than months or years, and who will wait patiently for an opportunity to strike. Only by understanding these different conceptions of civilisation can we begin to undo the damage wrought by the Iranian regime and other Islamists across the world.

It is unfashionable these days to defend Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” thesis. But the attack on Salman shows the truth in it. Yes, there really are different ideas of civilisation — and yes, they are in conflict with each other. The sooner we realise this, the sooner we can recover our belief in Western civilisation, and stand up for it unflinchingly against its enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Salman would not, I imagine, phrase it in such a way, nor would he place such an emphasis on the Westernness of these values. But he is nevertheless an exemplar of them; a champion of free speech, bravely standing up for Western ideals when so many shy away from the fight. If only more people could follow his example, instead of taking the path of appeasement in the name of cultural sensitivity, the long years of murder and mayhem wrought by the Islamists on the West might come to an end.

I have lived those long years; I know all too well the threat Islamism poses. After I came out as an apostate, I was forced into a bubble of protection that still surrounds me to this day. I have 24-hour security. I still receive death threats. My friend, the sweet, vulgar, brilliant Theo Van Gogh was murdered simply for making a film with me. His attacker used a knife to stab a letter into Theo’s chest: it said that I would be next.

When I heard the news about Salman last week, I couldn’t speak. I was horrified, but I was also scared. If they could get him on American soil, would I be next? Although I choose to live with security and Salman didn’t, the attack showed how patient and ruthless the enemy is. I am writing this four days after the attack, and have slept for as many hours. Will I ever be free? Will I ever feel safe? Will my children ever feel safe?

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But this isn’t my story: it is the story of Salman Rushdie and everyone he stands for, of all the people in the Muslim world and the West who dare to challenge sacred dogmas and find themselves threatened and even murdered for doing so. For them, for us, giving into fear is never an option. As Salman wrote after 9/11: “How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorised. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

And yet last Friday, I was scared. I felt terrorised. I was urged to go into hiding and stay silent for my own safety. For a few hours, I let fear rule my life. But still I knew deep down that freedom is a choice — and that I would keep choosing to be free, to speak and write as I please. In this way, in writing this very piece, I defy the Islamists and all others who would silence me.

Like Salman, I will continue to speak. Like Salman, I choose freedom.

“We’re worried about you,” said Amis. “I’m worried about me,” responded Rushdie. Sitting in the pew behind was Paul Theroux. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he chuckled.

Rushdie remembered the moment, funny in the queasy-hysterical way narrowly not being hit by a car is funny, in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton. After Friday’s attack on the author, which may cost him an eye and possibly more, the book is charged with new meaning.

Paparazzi and journalists began to follow Rushdie into the church. Hours before, Ayatollah Khomeini had issued his fatwa: “I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses… and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly.” Fleeing the press, Rushdie was spirited away by Alan Yentob in a BBC car.

Aged 40, Rushdie’s life was split into an unwanted second act. “How easy it was to erase a man’s past and to construct a new version of him,” he recalled, “an overwhelming version, against which it was impossible to fight.” Several builders collaborated to construct the new Rushdie. There was the Ayatollah, a man who had used children as mine-sweepers in the Iran-Iraq war, and who marked the tenth anniversary of the Iranian Revolution with his fatwa. There were the Muslims who rallied and rioted against Rushdie in France, America, Norway, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sweden, Pakistan, Australia, Turkey, and the Netherlands. And there were the governments who banned The Satanic Verses in two dozen countries. As he watched all this in hiding, the author “imagined the Great Pyramid of Giza turned upside down with the apex resting on his neck”.

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The British builders were generally more subtle, though no less insidious. One of the very first calls Rushdie received after the fatwa was from Keith Vaz, the MP for Leicester East. Vaz described what was happening as “appalling, absolutely appalling”. He promised to support Rushdie. A few weeks later, Vaz was one of the main speakers at a demonstration against The Satanic Verses, describing the event as “one of the great days in the history of Islam and Great Britain”.

But MPs need votes more than they need writers to have artistic freedom. Joseph Anton is full of moments when they let Rushdie down. Max Madden, the Labour MP for Bradford West — Bradford, the city where copies of The Satanic Verses were crucified and set alight — suggested that Rushdie add an insert into his book allowing Muslims to explain why they found it offensive.

Offensive. That was the main charge against Rushdie in Britain. The five years it took to make a novel sing could be reduced to one slander. On the political Right, Rushdie had already caused offence. In the Eighties he had denounced “the Augean filth of imperialism” and described the British police as representatives of “the colonising army”. And, yes, Rushdie had praised the Iranian revolution: “We may not approve of Khomeini’s Iran. But the revolution there was a genuine mass movement.”

Writers at the Telegraph and Spectator, as well as members of Margaret Thatcher’s government, were patriotically scandalised that a foreign power could order the death of a British citizen and try to get his book banned. Not in this blessed plot; not in our England, mate. But it was still a cause for tickily spite that Rushdie, as Charles Moore would later reflect, “used to attacking whitey with impunity” was “suddenly seeking whitey’s help”.

There was dark, malicious glee. Auberon Waugh wondered “just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people”. Sir Hugh Trevor-Roper said he wouldn’t be bothered if British Muslims decided to “waylay” Rushdie in an alleyway and “improve” his manners. Sir Stephen Spender, whose youthful communism was a distant memory, wrote in the Spectator of Rushdie: “It is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself…” Wasn’t it ironic that an immigrant like Rushdie, born in the twilight of the Raj before coming to England for boarding school, had become the hate figure of immigrants himself? “The liberals made their multicultural bed,” crowed Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, editor of the Sunday Telegraph. “Now they must lie on it, along with the rest of us.” Norman Tebbit spoke for them all when he described the novelist as an “outstanding villain”.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie recounts this without much bitterness. Being cast as the “uppity foreigner” was something he expected. Neither is he particularly saddened to find successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and Prince Charles, respond tepidly to the fatwa. The Prince of Wales reportedly said he would not support a writer who had insulted the “deepest convictions” of Muslims. He was the defender of more than one faith now.

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More surprising, though, was the reaction on the Left. It was one thing for the Daily Mail to label Rushdie as “unattractive, small-minded, arrogant, and egocentric”. But what did it mean for George Steiner, the great Cambridge polymath, no roast beef of old England merchant, to launch sustained, remorseless attacks on The Satanic Verses, while suggesting that Rushdie was “looking for trouble”? Who could explain John Berger denouncing Rushdie in the Guardian? Or Germaine Greer describing him as a “megalomaniac”? Or for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the Independent, seeking the fatwa’s positives for Britain’s Muslim community on its fifth birthday and claiming: “Had it not been for that fateful 14 February 1989, the world would be hurrying, unchallenged, towards the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald’s hamburgers.” Or the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy accusing him of “misjudging the people”? These were supposed to be his people.

Then there was John le Carré. The great author could hardly bring himself to condemn the USSR, but he was happy to give countless drubbings to Rushdie — by this point lying low in the Welsh Marches somewhere, under constant threat of death, as his publishers filled their offices with sniffer dogs and bomb-detection machinery. “Again and again, it has been within his power to save the faces of his publishers,” wrote le Carré, “and with dignity, withdraw his book until a calmer time has come. It seems to me he has nothing to prove but his own insensitivity.” Rushdie, he thought, was “impertinent” to believe that those who wrote literature had special claims to free speech.

Unlike the Right, which preferred to giggle in the darkness, le Carré had located the actual terrain where the battle over The Satanic Verses was being contested. This was about writerly freedoms. To tell stories. Nothing was padlocked. Any material could be nicked; to be mocked, worshipped, shredded, then picked up again, whenever you wanted to. The writer had the special privilege, those on Rushdie’s side argued, to be a dogmatician or a doubter. The point was that nobody told them which one to be. “Man was a storytelling animal,” Rushdie writes in Joseph Anton. “The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.”

Well, actually they could. Before Friday, the fires around Rushdie appeared subdued. The year was 2022. He believed he was safe. His prophecies about the decline of free speech were indulged but ignored. He had become a designer handbag novelist, whose fiction critics could safely attack again. He was in the uneasy position of being an anti-fundamentalist who said there were fundamental intellectual values to uphold.

Once he was stabbed 15 times, a season of fine words began. There was Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Twitter, hoping to see Rushdie pull through. There was Iranian Press Television’s own Jeremy Corbyn, offering solidarity. A contest was held: who would be the last politician to wish Rushdie well? (It was nearly Keir Starmer.) Fearing his death, and perhaps fearing that anyone with an internet connection could look up their behaviour during the initial rages of the fatwa, the Anglosphere jangled with weighty tributes to Rushdie.

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But the finest words of all, demonstrating how morbid it all was, came from a man dead for 10 years. In the first rounds of the fatwa, Christopher Hitchens had tirelessly stumped for Rushdie. Now, in this latest, unexpected round, Hitchens was summoned from his grave. All weekend, videos of him defending Rushdie were shared, videos where Hitchens spoke with an unimaginable frankness, videos where he spoke with more force, more intelligence, and more authority than anybody alive today.

In Joseph Anton, Rushdie writes that even his own defences of free speech had started to sound “stale in his own ears”. Something curdled in the 2010s. While he has escaped with his life long enough to become truly, especially bored of the fatwa, he begins to realise that the cause he is fighting for, the principle he embodies, is in decay. “Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know.” What was happening? A simple, popular idea: if the collective felt upset, it had the right to silence the individual. This is what countless controversies, from Charlie Hebdo to The Lady of Heaven, scratching away in the background, proved. Authors like Peter Carey, who defended Rushdie in the Nineties, would not defend Charlie Hebdo in 2015, not weeks after the cartoonists had been slaughtered in their offices.

The world had turned. The idea had been internalised. It had spread far and wide, beyond religion, beyond anything Khomeini could have imagined, freakishly stretching and reaching into every cultural nook. The principle had a language: “It isn’t worth the fuss; it’s not a good look; it won’t play well.” Easier to say, as the Associate Editor of the Independent did a few years ago, that Rushdie’s “silly, childish” book “should be banned under today’s anti-hate legislation”. Who wants a brick through the window, a death threat, a calumny, all that damage to your reputation? Write out of turn and you get what you deserve. People felt this was justice, not cowardice. This is what Gilroy, le Carré, and Berger were getting at. They realised first that poets were not “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. Poets were fair game, like everyone else. They realised, in fact, that most people do not like freedom of speech very much. Most people — and that includes most writers — will not risk being banished to Siberia.

“Good men would give in to fear and call it respect,” Rushdie predicted in Joseph Anton. “Good men would commit intellectual suicide and call it peace.” He was right. Martin Amis had worried about Salman Rushdie. What wasn’t so clear that morning in 1989 was how much further than Rushdie the culture of his fatwa would extend.

***

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It is hard to believe that more than 30 years have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses — longer ago than the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also experienced the combustion created when art meets Islam, back in 2004.

Over that summer, Submission, a 10-minute film that I co-created with Theo van Gogh, was aired on the taxpayer-funded VPRO channel in Amsterdam. I had pulled four very explicitly misogynistic verses out of the holy book, which Theo then inscribed on the bodies of women who acted out the selected verses. After a series of threats, Theo was murdered by a radical Islamist fanatic. Warned that I would be next, I went into hiding.

Dutch society got the message: Submission was pulled and since then nothing of any significance critical of Islam’s founding father or holy book has been aired or exhibited by any mainstream Dutch outlet. Two years later, the message was driven home in another small European country when Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, solicited drawings of the prophet Muhammad after a Danish school teacher wrote a children’s book on the prophet but could find no illustrations for it. After Rose published them, both he and one of the illustrators, Kurt Westergaard, received credible death threats.

The controversy over The Lady of Heaven — a drama about the daughter of the prophet Muhammad, Fatimah — is the latest illustration of the extreme difficulty, not to say danger, of mixing art and Islam. In all three cases, the central concern was over how European countries should accommodate a Muslim minority in Europe without sacrificing freedom of speech. On one side were those who believed Muslims should adapt to the places they now chose to call home; the other side preached that we should exercise patience and compassion.

Yet in all three cases, the debate was hijacked by a minority of Muslims who were willing to use brutal force to terrorise society into silence — threatening infidels and blasphemers, plotting attacks, beheading people and blowing things up. Most political and intellectual leaders in Europe were frightened. They would issue condemnations of the violence, followed by silence. Few expressed uncompromising defences of free speech. Most were inclined to suggest that free speech did not include the right to offend religious believers. This is a fatal caveat — as the staff at Charlie Hebdo discovered in 2015. It’s a lesson Samuel Paty was also forced to learn, after he showed Charlie Hebdo cartoons to his class in a Parisian suburb. It was enough to ignite the flames of Islamist intolerance: an 18-year-old Russian-Muslim refugee of Chechen origin beheaded Paty with a meat cleaver.

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In my book Heretic, I argue that there are three sets of Muslims. Islam is a single core creed based on the Qur’an, the words revealed by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad, and the Hadith, the accompanying works that detail Muhammad’s life and words. Despite some sectarian divisions — principally the ancient schism between Sunni and Shia — this creed unites all Muslims. All, without exception, know by heart these words: “I bear witness that there is no god but Allah; and Muhammad is his messenger.”

But today there is a contest within Islam for the ownership of that credo and all it entails: Muhammad and his prophethood, his family, his book, and his moral code of practice. In the early days of Islam, when Muhammad was going from door to door canvassing his idea of one God, he used the tool of persuasion through preaching to convert the Arab polytheists. This was when he was in Mecca. Those Muslims of today who love tolerance, charity, and an acceptance of the other use as their moral reference the Muhammad of this period. I call them the “Mecca Muslims”.

However, after ten years of trying this kind of persuasion, Muhammad and his small band of believers had won over no more than 200 believers. So they moved to Medina, where unbelievers were still invited to submit to the one God, Allah — but if they now refused, they were harassed, threatened, and murdered. A big spectacle was made of these brutal tactics. Muslims of today who kill, terrorise and threaten while screaming “Allahu Akbar” are replaying that script from Medina. These are the “Medina Muslims”.

The Mecca Muslims are repelled by the wanton violence of the Medina Muslims. However, they shrink away from debating them, leaving the arena of winning hearts and minds to the radicals. As a consequence, Mecca Muslims who can’t handle the dissonance either leave Islam, as I did, or, much more commonly, tacitly accept the dominance of the Medina Muslims.

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There is, however, a third group of Muslim dissenters: the “modifying Muslims”, who know it is hopeless just to keep declaring that Islam is a “religion of peace”, in defiance of successive bouts of Islamist violence. Most of these Muslim dissidents are reforming believers — among them clerics who have come to realise that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of violence, intolerance and backwardness.

One such cleric is Yasser Al-Habib, the author of the script for The Lady of Heaven. Al-Habib is a Kuwaiti cleric, a Twelver Shia who rejects the Iranian government’s pretensions to lead the Shia world, and the leader of the Mahdi Servants Union, a UK-based Shia group. Clearly, we are not talking here about secular liberals like Theo van Gogh, Flemming Rose or Charb. I doubt Yasser Al-Habib and I would find much common ground in the unlikely event of our meeting.

Nevertheless, the making of The Lady of Heaven should be seen as a milestone — a significant one, in my view – in the process of Muslim reformation. They picked a woman as their heroine, after all. That in itself is remarkable.

Islamic reform is a minefield, as every Muslim who has ever hinted at the desirability of adapting scripture knows. Yet after decades of the most barbaric violence committed in the name of their faith, some Muslims have had enough. They do not want to leave their faith as I did. They want to haul it into the modern world. This is how I view the Muslim makers of The Lady of Heaven: the central message of their film is that Islam was originally intended — in Mecca — to be a religion of peace.

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With discussion no longer taboo, European governments and societies now have to make their minds up about the category of Muslim leaders they wish to support. And so far, they are making the wrong choice. Take the most ardent proponent of a ban on The Lady of Heaven, an imam named Qari Asim, who was a government adviser on Islamophobia and deputy chairman of the anti-Muslim Hatred Working Group. For far too long the British government has consulted and even partnered with duplicitous clergymen like Mr Asim. They represent the non-violent but no less sinister arm of the Medina Muslims, the proponents of dawa — radicalisation that stops short of explicit calls for jihad, but points in that direction. Time and again, in every row over free speech, these people get exposed for who they are. And yet politicians continue to be duped. It took the British government until the weekend to dismiss Asim from his official roles.

None of this is to say that The Lady of Heaven is a good film. But that is not really the point. The Satanic Verses is not Rushdie’s best book. The cartoons in Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo were not great works of art. Nor, to be honest, was the film I made with Theo van Gogh.

But the mere fact that Muslims in 2022 would venture to release a film about the Muhammad’s daughter is an encouraging step in the ongoing Muslim reformation. This is a movement that all Western governments should support — just as they should ignore without apology all those who cry “blasphemy”, and prosecute anyone who attempts to use violence to deter artistic interpretation of their religion.

Two spring immediately to mind. First, and most obviously, we should fear the power that this sort of thing would place in human hands. We couldn’t be certain whether it would be used for good or ill – or rather, knowing what human beings are like, we would rightly fear its destructive potential.

But also, and less obviously, I think it would threaten to undermine the way in which human beings make sense of their lives and come to find meaning within it. If I can make myself immediately slimmer, say, with a quick bit of hocus pocus, then it would make no sense to think of my getting slimmer as the story of overcoming my inner demons, of struggle and achievement. There would be no inner drama in front of the fridge or the toaster. In such a world, diets would lead to two different types of weight loss: physical and existential, as in what Kundera calls “the unbearable lightness of being”. That is the deeper problem with magic. It robs life of its meaning, of its weight.

I was thinking of magic when I pondered my reaction to Tom Chivers’s piece for UnHerd about diet pills. He was writing about technology not magic, of course. His concern was to defend “fixes” to various social ills and specifically to defend technology against the charge of “solutionism” defined as the “foolhardy belief that technology can sidestep thorny social or political problems”.

Those, like me, who have a problem with “solutions”, think there is something wrong about – for example – a quick pharmacological fix to obesity. Pop a pill and you will be thin. That simple. What’s wrong with getting what you want like this, Chivers asks? Nothing at all, he concludes. But I don’t think he gave the solutionist argument a proper run for its money. So here goes.

The one area where there is widespread anxiety about the use of technological – especially pharmaceutical – fixes is within the field of elite sport. Here we call it doping. And why do we worry about doping? Because, ultimately, it drains sport of its meaning. If we allow any and every chemical fix to enter sport, then the difference between success and failure would be achieved in the lab and not on the pitch or piste. And that would rob sport of the very reason we find it compelling – that it is a battle of wills, of skill and of human courage. To replace all this with chemistry, where the winners are the ones with better lab teams, would fatally undermine the very existence of sport.

“Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal” wrote Yuval Noah Harari. “The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” It is a brilliant aphorism, and it sums up what is at stake between me and Chivers. He welcomes the (technological) power to change the world for the better; I worry that this process has an unexpected effect on the way human beings construct meaning in their lives.

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“The simple technological fix” impacts meaning because, in my view, meaning is overwhelmingly a question of narrative. Meaning is held by the stories we tell about ourselves and who we are. Human meaning is narrated. Not just through the so-called seven ages of man, but through thousands of little mini narratives all overlapping and interweaving. What Salman Rushdie calls the “Oceans of the Streams of Story”.

And “technological fixes” represent a jump or a glitch in the narrative — a going from one place to another that does not respect or, even acknowledge, the inner logic of the story.

This is all a bit abstract – meaning generally is – so let me offer a small example. At the end of the Monty Python film The Life of Brian, as Brian is about to die on the cross, a spaceship of little green aliens comes down from the sky and rescues him from his predicament. Everything in the story so far has been about the life of a first century Jew. And yet here, right at the end, the ridiculous intervention of little green men becomes a kind of absurd parody of human redemption.

Set aside for a moment the idea that for some the resurrection is also a kind of absurd skip in the story – and I can see the argument even though I disagree with it. What is going on here is a knowing reference to the kind of thing people have been complaining about since Euripedes. Sometimes also known as the deus ex machina, it is the sudden arrival of something that has no connection with what came before, and which solves the problem that has built up within the story in such a way that renders all that came before irrelevant and unimportant. Monty Python do this as a deliberate joke. But when it happens in most stories it is experienced as a kind of cheat, robbing the whole story of its meaning. This was precisely Nieztsche’s beef with Euripedes whom he held responsible for the death of tragedy, the meaning making matrix of the ancient Greeks.

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Consider all this in relationship to the diet pill fix for human obesity. Chivers concentrates on the simple fact that being thin, however achieved, would bring happiness to the formerly obese. It is instructive that those who argue this way tend to reach for the word “happiness” to express the benefit of what they describe. But in the meaning-creating world, happiness is often considered a rather thin idea, superficial even.

Some of us – most of us perhaps – seek a life that has a meaning that is a great deal more than happiness. We want a life that has a meaning and purpose that is deeper than mere personal happiness. And the technological fix — the deus ex machina of modernity — can threaten to undermine all of that. It can make our life absurd. All that struggle with overeating. All those hours on the therapist’s couch. All that human-all-too-human effort. And in the end the “answer” is a small pill. Suddenly, the story of my struggle with food looks absurd. It’s the “little green aliens” answer to my weight problems.

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The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke once formulated three laws that grew out of his writing. The third, and most famous, is “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Technology is not the same as magic, of course. Magic is fantasy, technology is reality. But in meaning terms they can be “indistinguishable” and have similar effects.

This is why religion as a meaning-generating activity holds magic in such low esteem, why the Bible has such harsh things to say about it. Magic is not so much about the supernatural — that was the world view of the whole ancient world, indeed of the world before, say, the 17th century. No, magic is problematic because of the power it wields, and also because it is the “get rich quick” approach to human salvation. Magic is to human meaning as winning the lottery is to prosperity. Both disrespect the process by which we can tell a noble and compelling story about who we are. Technological fixes — fixes that represent a radical discontinuity in the story of human endeavor — can do precisely the same. “Go the bloody hard way” Wittgenstein advised his students. And I completely agree. Those who offer shortcuts to human flourishing should be routinely distrusted.

It’s funny. Obviously the columnist has not been silenced; there he is, making lots of noise, in places where lots of people can hear him. 

Like lots of good political cartoons, it makes a case quickly and pithily, and it is very hard to argue against. But I want to try. 

The argument, with or without the cartoon, crops up an awful lot. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! suzanne moore cries, from the front page of a national newspaper,” tweeted one journalist, in response to an interview with Moore in the Telegraph and her piece in these pages last month. “The author of a book on the supposed ‘transgender craze seducing our daughters’ claims she is being silenced. It is a very loud silence,” ran the subtitle of a recent piece in The New Republic, about the author Abigail Shrier.

Or: “I would pause, for at least a few seconds,” wrote a columnist in the Guardian last year, of the historian Niall Ferguson, “if I found myself arguing that my freedom of speech was in a state of extreme jeopardy in this, my column in a national newspaper.” Current Affairs, 2018: “Pretty loud for being so silenced.” Also from 2018, the New Statesman: “If the “Intellectual Dark Web” are being silenced, why must we keep hearing about them?” 

As it happens, Moore never claimed (as far as I know) that she was being silenced: she said that it was becoming harder to express certain views. But the general question remains: is it possible for these people and their opinions to be simultaneously “silenced” and also widely expressed?

Obviously, if we take the word “silenced” to mean “literally made silent; unable to put their words out into the world at all”, then none of the above has been silenced . Their words are out there.

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But if the only people who have permission to complain about being silenced are the ones who are literally silenced, then — by definition — we will never hear about it. I would say it is perfectly possible for people to try to silence you. They might even be successful at partially silencing you, or reducing your output, or making you nervous to say things – even if they aren’t able to shut you up entirely. And I would say that even if they aren’t successful in the specific case of the famous person involved, it can still have free speech implications for other people.

A word of warning: I’m going to draw an analogy now. I can imagine that people will read it and say “oh so you’re saying that people being rude on Twitter is the same as a death threat,” so I wanted to get out ahead of that: it is not what I am doing. Philosophical analogies are meant to draw out our intuitions and find out where they break down, not say “X is exactly like Y”. With that said, here’s the analogy.

In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was the subject of a fatwa by Ayatollah Khomeini. He spent several years in hiding, under police protection; a $3 million bounty was offered for his death (with an extra $600,000 being added in 2016). The Japanese translator of the book was murdered; the Italian translator was stabbed, and the Norwegian publisher was shot, although both, mercifully, survived.

Was Rushdie being silenced? Well, he wrote several times for national newspapers during his period in hiding. He appeared on television and Radio 4 to discuss it. He even turned up on stage during U2’s 1993 tour promoting their Zooropa album. “I’VE BEEN SILENCED!!!! salman rushdie cries, from the stage of wembley stadium.”

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To reiterate: I’m not saying that Suzanne Moore or the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ are equivalent in any sense to Rushdie, or that they have been subject to the same level of threat as a fatwa and $3 million bounty. The point is that, if you accept that Rushdie was in some sense being “silenced”, then you acknowledge that it is possible for people to be simultaneously highly visible, with a platform to say the things they want to say, while also having their free speech curtailed: that it is possible to shout, truthfully, that you are being silenced from the front page of a national newspaper.

Of course, you may not accept that Rushdie was being silenced. This would, in fact, be a fairly reasonable position. The stated aim of the fatwa was not to silence Rushdie, to get him to retract the book, or anything – it was to kill him. According to Khomeini’s office, media reports that the fatwa would be lifted if Rushdie apologised were false: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and become the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to Hell.”

And this brings us to a second point. I’d say that there probably was a chilling effect on Rushdie himself, but you may disagree. But again: the point was not to silence Rushdie. It was to silence other people. In 2006, after the controversy about a Danish newspaper publishing cartoons showing images of Mohammed, the leader of Hezbollah expressed regret that the fatwa had been unsuccessful: “If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini’s fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Muhammad in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so.”

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Are people less willing to be critical of Islam or to depict Mohammed, in the wake of Rushdie’s fatwa, or the Charlie Hebdo killings, or the recent beheading of the French schoolteacher? Probably. Even if the specific target of an attempt to silence is not, in fact, silenced, other people might be. 

Again: I’m not saying that murder or the threat of murder is the same as being ostracised at work, or having people be rude to you on Twitter, or having people protest outside your talks, or whatever. What I am saying is that it is possible for people to, simultaneously, have a loud and prominent platform, and at the same time for people to be “silencing” them, or at least trying to. And, further, even if the attempted silencing doesn’t work on the individual in question, it could easily have a chilling effect on other people — especially those with less job security. We have been talking about famous people in the public eye, but we won’t hear about the less famous people who hold the same views and are now afraid to express them. The “I’M SILENCED!!! I cry from the front pages of a national newspaper” argument falls down in at least some cases.

So it is possible for a person — or at least their views — to be both loud and silenced. The question is, then (and I’ve avoided it so far): are they? Is Suzanne Moore, or Jordan Peterson, or anyone? Does what they have been subjected to amount to “silencing”, or are other people simply using their own freedom of speech to complain about or protest against them?

It’s worth noting that, although I’ve said that being rude on Twitter is not the same as a fatwa, there have been material threats to some of the people I mentioned above. Moore received messages from people saying “they were going to rape me, decapitate me, ejaculate inside my head, burn me”. Someone turned up at a Jordan Peterson meeting carrying a garrotte. UC Berkeley had to spend $600,000 on security when the IDW member Ben Shapiro made a speech there. I doubt any of them were in as much danger as Rushdie, but I can’t imagine it was pleasant.

But let’s leave that aside. If a prominent columnist has his or her column taken away (as the cartoon was about), or if there are protests outside talks, or if there is simply a storm of people being nasty about you on Twitter, can that be “silencing”, even if that person still has a prominent voice?

To some degree, this is a matter of definitions. Obviously, a lot of people on Twitter calling you nasty names is not as bad as having a fatwa on your head, but it will probably make you less willing to write about the same subject again (I have some limited experience of this). Whether that reaches the threshold of “silencing” is just a question of how you define the word.

I think in some cases it is less ambiguous, though. When an academic resigns over an email defending the right to wear potentially offensive Halloween costumes, or two others lose their jobs after arguing against a “day of absence” on campus for white people — again, it’s not as bad as credible death threats, but losing your job is quite a big deal. I could entirely understand that other academics would worry about making the same arguments, even if those ones in particular are still writing in the Wall Street Journal or whatever about their experience. I’d say there’s some silencing going on there, at least under my definition of the verb “to silence”. I certainly know some academics who tell me that there are things they believe but wouldn’t ever dare say in public. The same goes for some journalists.

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Which brings us to the final point. I think that it is possible to be both loud and silenced; and I think that in some cases, even those which fall short of the Rushdie standard of death threats and assassination attempts, it is reasonable to say that this has, in fact, happened.

The question, then, is whether that is a bad thing. The word “silenced” is one of those that most people think is automatically bad, but I don’t think that’s true: silencing Lord Haw Haw during the Second World War would have been absolutely fine by me. Silencing Osama bin Laden, in the sense of not publishing columns by him, or David Duke — also fine.

It might be fine by some means and not others, as well. Boycotts might silence people, but you might be OK with that, when you wouldn’t be with death threats to achieve the same aim.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that silencing Jordan Peterson or Suzanne Moore is equivalent to silencing David Duke. Lots of people strongly disagree with both of those authors, but they’re both within the body of mainstream opinion. Moore, for instance, seems to believe that trans people should be treated with respect and addressed with the pronouns of their choice, but that they remain their biological sex, and that there should be spaces reserved for biological females. That seems to be pretty much what the British public believe — or, at least, a majority of the public is in favour of using a trans person’s chosen pronouns, but is less likely to consider a trans person to be “really” of that gender (the poll didn’t ask about biological sex). Similarly, a majority is in favour of trans women using women’s toilets, but only in cases when that trans woman has physically transitioned.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that the British public is wrong. If YouGov had been around in the 1810s, the results of a poll on whether or not slavery was OK would not have determined whether or not slavery actually was OK. And you might argue that people back then should have tried to “silence” Lord Nelson and others who argued in favour of slavery. But it would have been strange to do so on the basis that they were extremist outliers. And if you were to try to get people fired for those opinions, you’d end up with unemployment rates around 50%. It just doesn’t seem viable.

And on the second point, again, you might think it’s not OK to send death threats, but it’s fine to send emails to someone’s boss if they express views you disagree with. Where you draw the line is up to you. I’m fairly absolutist on this — if you disagree with someone’s view, in almost all circumstances, you should express disagreement, not attempt to make it harder for them to express those views. “Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.” But I am aware that I am on the more extreme end of that spectrum, and many people disagree; where you draw the line is up to you (and up to society at large, as we all debate these issues).

But being silenced is not a binary condition. Someone can be prominent, and famous, and regularly appear on the television — and they, or their views, or people like them, could still be being silenced. And you shouldn’t get your political philosophy from a cartoon.

The prize and its justification ignited an argument which blazed for six months: can art be separated from politics? Should the intolerant be tolerated, let alone rewarded? Should liberalism take account of the consequences of speech even as it defends the right to speak? To put in in 2020 terminology: “Should Ezra Pound be cancelled?”

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The phrase “cancel culture” might have been coined by the Devil to ensure maximum rancour and confusion. It is currently both ubiquitous and uselessly vague. The offences under its rickety umbrella range from an unguarded line in an interview to serial sexual assault; the punishments stretch from a rough week on Twitter to career annihilation; the prosecutors might be a powerful institution or a few powerless tweeters.

As if that weren’t muddled enough, the current debate is largely taking place in a state of historical amnesia, as if the issues were as novel as the terminology. The sociologist Jib Fowles called this fallacy chronocentrism: “the belief that one’s own times are paramount, that other periods pale in comparison”. The author and academic Philip Seargeant suggests “the narcissism of the present”.

For many progressives, this unknowing is indeed a kind of generational vanity: only we, in the early 21st century, have the moral clear-sightedness and mettle to reprimand behaviour that our predecessors let slide. There is a whole click-friendly genre of journalism dedicated to scolding “of its time” art in the tone of a disappointed schoolteacher, while oblivious to the fact that many of their points were made at the time.

For their opponents, meanwhile, chronocentrism magnifies the danger of current challenges to free speech: the mob is at the gates, the clock is ticking and the survival of liberalism itself hangs in the balance. Novelty inspires urgency. It doesn’t help them to point out that conservative writers were routinely warning against “liberal fascism” and “a new McCarthyism” 30 years ago, nor that some of them simultaneously endorsed censorship of work that offended them. Both versions of the fallacy imply that, roughly between the peak of the Enlightenment and the launch of Twitter, it was plain sailing.

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This narcissism of the present became a little grotesque in the response to last week’s instantly notorious open letter to Harper’s, ‘A Letter on Justice and Open Debate’. Critics caricatured the signatories as a bunch of pampered, out-of-touch gatekeepers who are unaccustomed to criticism or challenge, as if decades of literary feuds, brutal reviews, boycotts and controversies had never happened.

Try telling that to Salman Rushdie, who was not only threatened with the ultimate cancellation by the Ayatollah Khomeini but had to listen to eminent figures from across the political spectrum say that, regrettable though it was, he had brought the fatwa on himself by writing the damn book in the first place, and who might therefore know a thing or two about threats to free speech. (The Algerian author Kamel Daoud has also received a fatwa.)

Other signatories, such as Noam Chomsky, Greil Marcus and Todd Gitlin, have been defending freedom of expression since the 1960s and are unlikely to draw the line at JK Rowling. Anyone disappointed by their participation hasn’t been paying attention. These people know that there are in fact worse things than being shouted at on Twitter. Most of them aren’t even on Twitter.

The Rushdie affair began in 1989, which happened to coincide with the height of the political correctness wars of the 1980s and 1990s. I remember the efforts to cancel, quite literally, works such as Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ and Ice-T’s Cop Killer — just some of the examples that made many Gen X-ers extremely antsy about censorship from any side. I was left feeling that you couldn’t decry censorship from the Right while encouraging it from the Left, or vice versa.

I have a stack of out-of-print books from the early 90s about arguments that are both half-forgotten and strikingly relevant. Take this line: “We have not abrogated anybody’s First Amendment rights. We’ve just said we don’t want any kid to be forced to read this racist trash… Anybody who teaches this book is a racist.” That was a high school administrator in 1982, talking about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Or this apparently timely observation: “For the first time in American history, those who call for an extension of rights are also calling for an abridgement of speech.” That was Christopher Hitchens in 1993.

Whether or not you agree with either of them, we have clearly been here before. Give me a current culture war flashpoint — no-platforming, identity politics, diversified curricula, whatever — and I’ll find you a precursor.

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This, though, is still the relatively recent past, so let’s jump back to 1915 and D. W. Griffith’s horrific masterpiece The Birth of a Nation. Nobody would now dispute that it is viciously racist but it’s essential to remember that many people thought it was viciously racist then, and tried to have it banned for inciting hatred and violence. “We are aware… that it is dangerous to limit expression, and yet, without some limitations civilization could not endure,” argued the great civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. Liberals were torn, as liberals usually are,“between two desires,” wrote one journalist. “They hate injustice to the negro and they hate a bureaucratic control of thought.” Ultimately, the film remained in theatres but the protests became an inseparable part of its legacy.

The Pound affair concluded in August 1949 with a congressional decision that the Library of Congress should stay out of the business of prize-giving in future. Helpfully for us, the arguments were well-documented in the May issue of Partisan Review, which solicited opinions from half a dozen prominent thinkers, including three of the Bollingen jurors. They were all writing in the knowledge that Hitler had demonstrated the ultimate destination of dehumanising hate speech while Stalin had zombified a nation’s culture by prohibiting anything that deviated from Soviet orthodoxy, so the worst-case scenarios were more than thought experiments.

The only point upon which the writers could all agree was opposition to censorship. Karl Shapiro, one of the dissenting judges, opposed the award on the grounds that Pound’s hatreds infected his poetry, as did Irving Howe: “A hand to defend him from censors, fools and blood-seekers, yes. But a hand of honor and congratulations, no.” Clement Greenberg wrote that, as a Jew, he felt both offended and made “physically afraid” by Pound’s poetry, yet didn’t necessarily object to the prize. George Orwell thought that the judges should have asterisked their decision by mentioning Pound’s “evil” opinions. William Barrett, the magazine’s editor, derided the kind of performative ultra-liberal who celebrated the award precisely because Pound was so reprehensible:

“I am against censorship in principle even though in particular cases it might be publicly beneficial, because censorship, once invoked, is difficult to control and therefore dangerous. I think this is as far as liberalism need go… Liberalism is urged here to countenance things that deny its own right to exist — and for no other purpose but to show off. There is a kind of childishly competitive bravado in this need to show that one can out-liberal all other liberals.”

Such a person, he thought, might next try to honour “a bad poet who expresses antisemitism just in order to show how liberal he can be”.

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Although you’ll rarely find a case as clear-cut as a poetry prize for a treasonous anti-Semite, the arguments hold up. Of course, social norms change and the boundaries of acceptable opinion shift. Technology has transformed the discourse, too, by amplifying other voices (all of the writers arguing over Pound were white men) in arenas that are much noisier than the pages of Partisan Review.

More worryingly, the 1949 consensus that censorship is a line one should not cross no longer holds, nor does the assumption of good faith on the part of one’s opponents on a matter of conscience rather than partisan allegiance. Yet the fundamental disagreement about the priorities of liberalism does not feel that different from the furore around Peter Handke, a former supporter of Slobodan Milošević, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature 70 years later, or the staff of Charlie Hebdo receiving an honour from PEN after 10 of their colleagues were murdered in 2015. No case sets an iron precedent; the central conundrum is never resolved.

One positive outcome of the recent furore over statues was much greater awareness of the history of slavery, imperialism and why certain monuments were erected in the first place, but it has still been framed, for the most part, as an argument between the present and the past: the enlightened living versus the dead racists.

I think we could all benefit from learning more about the history of arguments themselves. Evan Smith’s No Platform, for example, explains how restrictions on campus speech have been hotly contested for almost half a century. Helen Lewis’s Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights tells a story of friction — sometimes productive, sometimes not — rather than unanimity and takes care to resurface thorny pioneers who have fallen out of the historical narrative. Lewis quotes James Baldwin: “I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

By paying our forerunners the respect of acknowledging that they thrashed out many of the same issues of conflicting rights as us, we can remind ourselves that these dilemmas aren’t going to be resolved in a hurry, nor do they have to be. We are neither the first nor the last nor the most important. Years from now, when “woke” and “cancel culture” are rusting on the lexical scrapheap, these arguments will still be raging and perhaps a subsequent chronocentric generation will have forgotten that we cared enough to have these fights, too.

Earlier this week a group of 150 writers appended their names to an open letter published in Harper’s Magazine (note to British readers — this is not the same thing at Harper’s and Queen, which would be a stranger home for such a declaration).

The contents were, as at least one signatory admitted, fairly anodyne. The letter spoke of “the free exchange of information and ideas” and of how this constituted “the lifeblood of a liberal society”. It went on to criticise the current vogue for ‘cancelling’ people because of their expressed opinion, stating that “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk-taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.”

All of which seems eminently reasonable, almost to the point of something so bland it hardly needs to be said. What is more, the organisers of the letter were clearly careful to signal that they were based in the dead-centre/centre-left of the political culture wars; its opening paragraph spoke of the “forces of illiberalism [that] are gaining strength” and which have, according to the letter, “a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy”.

This latter offering probably made good political sense to the writers. After all, the last four years have increasingly seen ‘free speech’ being depicted as some kind of ‘alt-right’ issue. If you are in favour of free speech but would like to be seen as politically respectable then it is crucial that you clear your throat by denouncing the US President as an equal threat (at least) to the illiberal Left. Otherwise your peers may have too easy a time presenting you as yet another tiki-torch-wielding racist.

The signatories of the letter were well chosen. There were plenty of women among their number; not all of the signatories were white. And there was even – rarest of all — a degree of political diversity among the signatories. As well as people like Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and J.K. Rowling — all figures identifiably of the political Left — the letter was also signed by David Frum, former speechwriter to George W Bush and ardent ‘never-Trump’-er.

In a way this cut-off point only a millimeter to the Right of the political centre told its own story about the extent of political diversity. If you are to get a large group of Left-wingers to sign a letter, even a letter in support of a fundemantal liberal principle like free speech, one must be careful not to contaminate them by proximity to anyone further to the Right than David Frum.

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Alas even this cautious positioning did not entirely work. J.K. Rowling may be the most successful author of her generation, perhaps of all time, and a woman whose political views have always denoted her as being of the political Left. But in recent months an author idolised by millions of young readers has asserted that biological sex exists and that, while trans people should be afforded the same rights and dignity as everyone else, nevertheless they are not quite the same thing as born-women.

For expressing this view J.K. Rowling has come to be viewed by a certain type of activist as to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Donald Trump or Steve Bannon. So the Harry Potter creator affixing her signature to the Harper’s letter was already going to be a provocation too much for some sensitive souls, while the inclusion of even one solitary figure — Frum — from the centre-Right made the whole affair too toxic for others to bear.

From the moment that the letter was published its critics were inadvertantly revealing why it needed to be written in the first place. Many asserted that cancel culture did not exist, that it was another example of the interminable ‘gas-lighting’ or ‘dog-whistle’ claims of an increasingly marching Right. Many of the activists making this claim were, of course, also arguing that signatories of the letter should be cancelled, for proximity to transphobia, among other thought-crimes. Vox’s Matt Yglesias was denounced by his own colleague because, of course, political opinions threaten safety; this, again, proved the point of the letter.

Elsewhere, and perhaps even more enjoyably, there were those who objected to the idea that in a letter purporting to span the political divide there should be people on the list who, er, spanned the political divide. One of the signatories, a little-known author called Jennifer Finney Boylan, even issued an apology within hours of the letter’s publication. “I did not know who else had signed that letter,” she wrote: “I thought I was endorsing a well-meaning, if vague, message against internet shaming. I did know Chomsky, Steinem, and Atwood were in, and I thought, good company. The consequences are mine to bear. I am so sorry.”

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It must be an awful thing to discover, that. You wake one morning believing that you have just signed the usual “well-meaning, if vague” letter alongside a genocide-denier and other reputable Left-wing authors, only to discover that a former speechwriter to a Republican president is on the same list of names as yours. What a lot of weight that must be to bear. Almost intolerable in its way.

Of course, others did not even reach the great point of bravery achieved by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Some authors revealed that the letter had come across their desks but that they had given it a pass, among them someone called Kaitlyn Greenidge, who announced on Twitter that the letter had been passed to her a week before.

“I was so mad about it when I read it and have been angry about it for days,” she tweeted. She then copied in the email she had written to the organisers in which she wrote that she did not think that ‘cancel culture’ was a real threat. “Or, at least, I do not believe being asked to consider the history of anti-blackness and white terrorism when writing a piece, after centuries of suppression of any other view in academia, is the equivalent of a loss of institutional authority.”

In a way the reaction to the Harper’s letter neatly demonstrates the impossibility of the task it sought to achieve. A letter calling for unity across political divides showed up the great political problem of the era, which is not intolerance in the general, but the absolute unwillingness of the political Left to tolerate the political Right. In trying to be inclusive it was accused of including people accused of bigotry; in attempting to find a common cause for writers to unite around it was accused of providing cover for ‘white terrorism’. In attempting a ‘hang together’ ethic it found some of its number hanging apart within hours of lift-off.

Suggested reading

Why won't liberals defend liberalism?

By Peter Franklin

It is bad news, this. It suggests the difficulty of finding any ethic around which our societies might unite. For all the decency of their stand, the Harper’s organisers could not reach out in any real way. They dared not, for instance, reach out to any figures who are supportive of the current President of the United States, a figure who, while divisive, happens also to have been elected. Why were Roger Kimball, Conrad Black or Victor Davis Hanson not among the letter’s signatories, for example, if the aim was to show that liberal society offered a wide spectrum of debates that could be reasonably argued?

And yet, even in a letter whose lines of delineation were chosen with exceptional, unrepresentative care, the wider, clamouring crowd could not be satisfied. Is it the worst thing in the world that the Harper’s letter met such an opposition? Obviously not. Is it a bad sign? Absolutely.