When it’s illegal to cause distress to believers, call it for what it is: a secular version of blasphemy | Kenan Malik
Language can ‘open eyes’, Salman Rushdie wrote, yet still ideas of profanity are being used to silence dissenting voices
‘Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.” So insists Salman Rushdie in Knife, his “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, written after he almost lost his life in a ferocious assault in Chautauqua, a small town in upstate New York, where he had gone to give a talk in August 2022.
As Rushdie rose to speak, a young man rushed towards him wielding a knife with which he inflicted terrible wounds “to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere”, excruciatingly severing the optic nerve of Rushdie’s right eye. The talk he never gave was to have been about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.
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