Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the neck, arm, and abdomen on August 12 by a man who stormed onto the stage as the author was about to give a lecture in western New York.
The knife attack against Rushdie took place more than 33 years after a fatwa was decreed against him by Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The decree sentenced Rushdie to death for having written the novel The Satanic Verses.
Since February 14, 1989, when Khomeini declared this fatwa condemning Rushdie as the author of The Satanic Verses, which the cleric claimed was an insult to Islam, Rushdie, a British-American novelist who was born in India in 1947, had to spend years in hiding.
Publishers around the world who published or planned to publish The Satanic Verses in their native languages also received many death threats.
Two were from Turkey. Erdal Öz (1935–2006), a pioneering publisher and author, and Aziz Nesin (1915–1995), a prominent author and critic of Islam, were subjected to death threats and violent attacks for translating Rushdie’s work.
Erdal Öz’s son, Can Öz, said that Erdal Öz, the founder of Can Publishing House, had received death threats several times. The reason for this was false information claiming that Erdal Öz planned to publish The Satanic Verses in Turkish.
On August 13, Öz made the following statements on his Twitter account:
I am very sorry for what happened to Salman Rushdie. I am disgusted by what happened. This disgust is based not only on the fundamentalism that has plagued the world, or the attack against a writer that I love, but also on an event that happened 30 years ago.’
In 1988, about a year after Khomeini issued a fatwa decreeing that death was obligatory for Salman Rushdie following the publication of The Satanic Verses, a fake news report appeared, if I am not mistaken, in the [Turkish] newspaper Hürriyet, [claiming] that Can Publishing House plans to publish The Satanic Verses.
Can [Publishing House] was not yet Rushdie’s publisher at that time. Following this [news report], numerous threatening letters were received by Can publishers. One of them was sent directly to my father, Erdal Öz, affirming: “We will come to your house on Saturday, at such a date, and we will first kill your children and your wife, and then we will kill you.” Of course, this was only one of the threats we received. We went to Şile that weekend, just as we would do almost every weekend. When we returned to our house, we saw that it had been broken into, and that the interior furniture and paintings were destroyed.
It looked as if a herd of rhinos had rampaged through the house. Years passed; it must have been around 2011-2012. Now Can [Publishing House] was publishing Salman Rushdie’s books (with great pride), and one evening when Rushdie’s agent, his manager, Andrew Wylie, visited Turkey, we met for a drink, and he asked me why we didn’t want to publish The Satanic Verses.
I told him that we would really like to, but I wouldn’t take the risk. This risk would not be limited to the publishers. There was an atrocious, fundamentalist threat towards everyone involved, from the editor-in-chief, the assistant editor, the translator, to the publishing coordinator, [etc.] Andrew and I became friends that day. We keep in touch. Can [Publishing House] will continue to be Rushdie’s publisher. But we will continue to avoid publishing The Satanic Verses, which is a great piece of work. It is not something I’m proud of, and it hurts my heart, but I’m not ashamed of the explanations given to Andrew Wylie.
I hope Rushdie gets well soon and continues to write against this radical darkness. And we will continue to publish, read, and inform.
Another intellectual who received death threats and was violently attacked for attempting to translate The Satanic Verses was Aziz Nesin, a Turkish author of more than 100 books.
Nesin started to write columns in the newspaper Aydınlık in 1993. He became a target of outrage from Islamists for having announced that he would publish The Satanic Verses in Turkish. Some excerpts of the Turkish translation of the book by Nesin were published in Aydınlık. However, the editions of the newspaper that included the translations were later withdrawn from the market.
On July 2, 1993, Islamists violently targeted the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Festival in the city of Sivas. Nesin was one of the participants.
Prior to the attack, during an interview, a journalist told Nesin that “Muslims are disturbed by his statements such as ‘I have no religion’ and by the translations of Rushdie’s book.” Nesin responded:
I am never disturbed by Muslims. But Muslims should also get used to me and they should not be disturbed by me either. I don’t have to be a Muslim. But I respect Muslims and all religions. If someone worships stones in a decent and genuine way, I respect them. It is none of my business. It is their issue. I respect Muslims especially because I come from a very religious Muslim family… But if someone insults [Islam], I won’t tell them not to, or if someone insults Christianity, I won’t tell them not to either. You should respond [to the criticisms]. Civilized people offer an answer if they are exposed to an injustice. But not by attacking, killing or snarling. If they are civilized, they will do what civilization requires.
When the interviewer told Nesin that Muslims were provoked by comments about Islam’s prophet Mohammed’s wives, Nesin said:
They can be provoked. Then they should provide an answer… But a human being does not attack when provoked… Civilized people, enlightened people show their reaction through writing, speaking, and expressing themselves. They don’t attack. They don’t attempt to kill, or beat people…
Muslims, Christians, and other believers should be for debate. No result can come from fighting. They might kill Aziz Nesin; another Nesin will emerge. Another Ahmet, Mehmet will emerge. For humans have brains; they think. You should counter an opinion with your own opinion. You can refute and ruin an argument with a counter argument. But you do so with your ideas, not by killing.
Sadly, being civil or civilized is not the Islamists’ way. On the day of the attack, the perpetrators, who demanded sharia, claimed that Nesin’s translations of Rushdie’s work provoked them. They set fire to the Madimak hotel, where Nesin was staying, and burnt to death 37 intellectuals – mostly Alevis. Fortunately, Nesin, who was 78 at that time, survived the fire.
Ironically, Turkey was not ruled by an Islamist regime during that period. The so-called “secular” government of Turkey, however, sided with and empowered the Islamists, while victimizing the advocates of secularism. The 1990s were a dark period for secular intellectuals in Turkey. Professor Bahriye Üçok was murdered on October 6, 1990 in her own house for criticizing the Muslim headscarf. Professor Muammar Aksoy was shot to death in front of his house on January 31, 1990. Journalist Çetin Emeç, who wrote many articles critical of Islamist organizations, was murdered in his car on March 7, 1990. And on September 4, 1990, a former imam and staunch critic of Islam, Turan Dursun, was murdered by Islamists in front of his house in Istanbul.
If the Turkish state and society had chosen to protect those intellectuals and pay attention to their messages and warnings about political Islam, Turkey would probably be a much more viable, democratic, and free country today. But subsequent Turkish governments chose to empower Islamists, destroy non-Muslim citizens, and silence secularists – massive mistakes that has plunged Turkey into an abyss of tyrannical darkness in which it is still struggling today.
Uzay Bulut is a Turkish journalist and political analyst formerly based in Ankara.
