In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the death of novelist Salman Rushdie. The story did not end there.
This is part two. It follows Rushdie's years in hiding and the violent attacks on translators and publishers worldwide.
And how more than thirty years later the threat returned.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part three, the final part, of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:30] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in the English-speaking world, from a student hanged in Edinburgh to the abolition of blasphemy law in 2008 to modern calls to bring it back.
[00:00:42] In part two, we told the first part of the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book, the protests, who Khomeini was, and the fatwa of Valentine's Day 1989.
[00:00:55] Today, we’ll pick up the story where we left off, so if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, now is the time to press pause and listen to that one.
[00:01:06] OK, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I said we’d pick up the story directly where we left off, on the 14th of February, 1989, after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
[00:01:27] If you’ll allow me, first I’d like to transport you a few decades later, to the 12th of August, 2022.
[00:01:38] The setting for what I’m about to describe is not a hidden safe house in the English countryside or some secret apartment in Mumbai; it is the Chautauqua Institution, a nineteenth-century adult education retreat on the shores of a lake in western New York state.
[00:01:59] Every summer, thousands of people come here for lectures and discussions. It's quiet, thoughtful, and civilised. It’s exactly the kind of place you might go to hear a famous novelist give a talk.
[00:02:16] Salman Rushdie is on the stage.
[00:02:20] He is seventy-five years old.
[00:02:22] He is, by this point, a celebrated figure in New York literary life. He is visible, accessible, a regular at events and dinner parties.
[00:02:35] He still has a security detail, but the years of hiding are long behind him.
[00:02:43] He has written many books since The Satanic Verses. He has been knighted by the Queen, so he is Sir Salman Rushdie, to give him his proper title.
[00:02:54] He is, as far as anyone can tell, safe.
[00:02:59] It’s early morning, and Rushdie is about to speak to the crowd of literary enthusiasts.
[00:03:06] Suddenly, a young man with a black mask jumps onto the stage and rushes towards the celebrated author.
[00:03:15] He pulls out a knife and stabs Rushdie repeatedly, fifteen times, before anyone can stop him.
[00:03:24] Rushdie is airlifted to hospital, with the doctors reporting that it’s touch and go.
[00:03:31] The injuries nearly kill him. He loses the sight in one eye, and the use of one hand, but he survives.
[00:03:41] The attacker is apprehended at the scene. He is a twenty-four-year-old Lebanese-American from New Jersey.
[00:03:50] The police don’t have to scratch their heads too much as to a motive, but it turns out that the would-be killer had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:03] He was not motivated, he said, by the offensive content of the novel, but rather his admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:04:13] Now, Rushdie almost died, but he was not the only victim of the Ayatollah’s fatwa.
[00:04:21] And indeed, to clarify, the fatwa was not limited to Rushdie alone, but rather anyone connected with the book. Everyone who had helped to spread it, through translating, publishing, and selling this blasphemous work.
[00:04:38] The first attack had come two years after the fatwa.
[00:04:43] Hitoshi Igarashi was a professor at Tsukuba University in Japan. He was the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:53] On the 11th of July, 1991, he was stabbed to death in his office at the university.
[00:05:01] He was forty-four years old.
[00:05:03] His killer was never identified. And the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:05:10] The same month, in Milan, the Italian translator of the novel, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked in his apartment. He was stabbed several times and left for dead.
[00:05:23] Fortunately, he survived.
[00:05:26] In October 1993, William Nygaard — the Norwegian publisher of the book — was shot three times outside his home in Oslo.
[00:05:37] He survived, but barely.
[00:05:41] And in the weeks after the fatwa, bookshops in Britain received bomb threats. Two were bombed. Several American chains of bookshops removed the novel from their shelves.
[00:05:54] This was a powerful message; touch this book, do anything that helps spread its message, and you will be putting your life in danger.
[00:06:06] The effect on the publishing world was real and lasting.
[00:06:11] After the Rushdie affair, publishers around the world became more cautious about books that might attract similar responses.
[00:06:20] Some editors declined projects they might otherwise have taken on. The calculation behind a publishing decision began to include a question it had never previously included: could someone get killed for this?
[00:06:36] This is what Rushdie has called the true cost of the fatwa — not just what happened to him, but the invisible books that were never written, never published, never translated, because someone somewhere decided the risk was too high.
[00:06:54] Now, while all of this was happening, Rushdie had disappeared.
[00:06:59] Not entirely. But the life he had been living — the dinners, the literary events, the freedom to walk down a street on a whim — it all ended the day the news came through.
[00:07:13] He was given a cover name: Joseph Anton, which he took from the first names of two writers he admired, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
[00:07:23] He used that name for nearly a decade.
[00:07:27] He has written about his daily reality in a memoir titled Joseph Anton. He chose, interestingly, to write about himself in the third person — as "he" rather than "I" — as though describing someone else entirely.
[00:07:46] What he describes is an existence of constant movement and constant precaution. Safe houses. Police escorts. The total loss of spontaneity. Every journey, every appearance, every dinner at a friend's house requiring advance planning and negotiation with his protection team.
[00:08:08] He writes about the small things.
[00:08:10] The first time he was able to browse in a bookshop — just standing in front of a shelf, looking at the spines — without a bodyguard at his shoulder.
[00:08:22] It took years before he was able to do this.
[00:08:26] He has described the whole experience as a kind of living death.
[00:08:31] He was alive.
[00:08:33] But he was not free.
[00:08:36] And as you might imagine, while Rushdie was forced into hiding, the literary world was arguing.
[00:08:45] Some rallied to Rushdie's defence with complete conviction.
[00:08:50] Others said he had brought it on himself.
[00:08:54] This debate ran on for months. It was fierce, and played out in newspaper columns and television panels.
[00:09:03] One of the most prominent voices was John le Carré, the celebrated author of spy novels like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
[00:09:14] He wrote a piece arguing that freedom of expression was not unlimited, that a writer had a responsibility to consider the consequences of their words, and that Rushdie had been reckless.
[00:09:30] Rushdie’s reply was simple: the moment you accept that a writer must soften their work because a group of people may react violently, you have handed that group a veto.
[00:09:45] Not through the law, but through the threat of violence.
[00:09:51] And if you grant that veto, you have not protected anyone. You have simply made violence an effective tool for silencing people.
[00:10:01] The exchange ran for weeks, in letters and articles in the British press. Two of the most celebrated novelists in Britain, arguing in public about the most fundamental questions in literature.
[00:10:16] The children’s author Roald Dahl went even further.
[00:10:21] He published a piece calling Rushdie a "dangerous opportunist" who had deliberately set out to provoke Muslims and had shown no care for what he was unleashing on others.
[00:10:33] On the other side, the famous essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens, became one of the most vocal defenders of Rushdie.
[00:10:43] Hitchens went further than most. He argued that the fatwa was not primarily a religious matter at all. It was a political act — a deliberate attempt by the Iranian state to intimidate writers, publishers, and governments around the world into accepting that certain subjects were off-limits.
[00:11:05] The correct response, he argued, was not sympathy or concessions. It was to defend free expression without qualification.
[00:11:15] As the old saying goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
[00:11:24] But the debate was not just between famous names in newspapers.
[00:11:30] After the fatwa, journalists took to the streets of Britain, travelling to Bradford and Birmingham to ask local British Muslims what they thought of the fatwa.
[00:11:43] What many viewers found unsettling was not just what some people said, but who was saying it.
[00:11:52] These were not distant figures from some foreign world, elderly men with thick accents in traditional dress. Many were young men who had grown up in Britain, gone to school in Britain, and spoke with local English accents.
[00:12:08] They wore jeans and played football.
[00:12:12] And some of them said, quite calmly, that Rushdie deserved to die.
[00:12:18] Some added that they wouldn’t necessarily do it themselves, while others proudly declared that if they had the chance, they would kill him.
[00:12:28] For a certain kind of liberal Britain, these interviews were deeply troubling.
[00:12:34] They suggested that integration, and the idea that second-generation immigrants would naturally absorb British values about free speech and tolerance, well, it was not happening in the way people had assumed.
[00:12:50] Or that it was happening alongside a religious identity that could, on certain questions, override it.
[00:12:59] Now, whether that reading was fair or not is a different debate.
[00:13:04] But the images stuck.
[00:13:07] Capital punishment had been effectively abolished two decades earlier, and the last case of someone being executed for blasphemy was three centuries earlier.
[00:13:18] Yet the BBC was showing footage of young British men nodding their heads to the command by a head of a foreign state that a prominent British citizen should be killed for his words.
[00:13:33] Now, to clarify, of course there was not one uniform opinion in the British Asian community.
[00:13:41] Many disagreed with it, and the TV programmes that showed interviews with people supporting the fatwa also included interviews with people who disagreed with it.
[00:13:52] But in the public imagination, they were often lumped together into one frightening picture.
[00:13:59] And in a perhaps even more surreal turn of events, the singer Cat Stevens got caught up in this affair.
[00:14:08] He was one of the most beloved British singer-songwriters of the 1970s: classics like Wild World and Father and Son.
[00:14:17] He had converted to Islam in 1977, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and stepped away from music. He was probably the most famous British convert to Islam.
[00:14:31] And so, in 1989, shortly after the fatwa was issued, he was asked what he thought of it.
[00:14:39] And he responded that it was clear: Rushdie deserved to die for insulting the prophet Muhammad.
[00:14:48] It was all over the news, with headlines like “Cat says kill Rushdie”, and it has dogged him ever since.
[00:14:57] In later interviews, Stevens distanced himself from these remarks, and said they had been taken out of context and he didn’t really understand what he was talking about.
[00:15:08] Still, for many people watching, it was a disorientating moment; this British singer siding with an Iranian cleric rather than the laws of his own country.
[00:15:22] Now, while all of this was being argued in newspapers and television studios, the diplomatic and political fallout was playing out at a different level.
[00:15:33] The reaction in the Western world was almost uniformly one of condemnation.
[00:15:39] The British government recalled its ambassador from Tehran. Iran recalled its ambassador from London. Diplomatic relations were suspended.
[00:15:50] The European Community issued a joint condemnation. Writers and intellectuals around the world rallied to Rushdie's defence. PEN International, the organisation that campaigns for freedom of expression, made his case a defining cause.
[00:16:08] No religious authority, in any country, had the right to sentence a writer to death for a work of fiction.
[00:16:17] Rushdie responded to the pressure by issuing a statement expressing regret for the distress caused to sincere Muslim believers.
[00:16:28] It was a half-apology, and importantly, he did not retract anything.
[00:16:35] And Khomeini too stuck to his guns. He issued a follow-up clarification: even if Rushdie repented and became the most devout man alive, it would remain the duty of every Muslim to carry out the sentence.
[00:16:51] There was no way back.
[00:16:55] Now, Khomeini died in June 1989, four months after the fatwa.
[00:17:02] After his death, he ascended to an almost prophetic status; nothing he said could be questioned.
[00:17:11] His successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, reaffirmed it.
[00:17:15] But the practical situation began, slowly, to change.
[00:17:22] In 1998, the Iranian government under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made a public statement: Iran would not support the carrying out of the fatwa and considered the matter resolved.
[00:17:37] This, however, was not the same as lifting it.
[00:17:41] But it changed the calculation. Rushdie's protection was scaled back. He began to travel more freely. He moved to New York. He resumed a public life.
[00:17:55] Over time, he seemed, by all appearances, safe.
[00:18:00] Which brings us back to Chautauqua.
[00:18:03] To Hadi Matar, who had never been to Iran, who had not been recruited by any organisation, and who had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:16] He had read enough. He had watched the videos of Khomeini online and decided that he would do as the Ayatollah had commanded.
[00:18:26] As you heard, Rushdie survived. He lost an eye and the movement in one hand, but he has continued to write. A memoir of the attack itself, suitably titled Knife.
[00:18:40] And now he is back to writing fiction.
[00:18:44] He published a collection of short stories last year, in 2025, and says he plans to keep on writing until he no longer can.
[00:18:54] Now, perhaps the Rushdie affair can feel like a story from another era, a religious declaration being issued by an old man born at the turn of the 20th century.
[00:19:07] In reality, the questions the affair raised are still far from resolved.
[00:19:13] The first question is the one le Carré and Rushdie were arguing about: does freedom of expression come with responsibilities? Can a writer write whatever they want, or should they take into account the perspective of people who might be offended by their words?
[00:19:32] The second is about what freedom of expression actually means.
[00:19:38] Freedom of expression, in liberal democracies at least, is a protection against the state. It means the government cannot arrest you, silence you, or punish you for what you say or write.
[00:19:52] It does not mean freedom from other people's reactions.
[00:19:56] The Muslim communities in Bradford who burned the book, who wrote to their MPs, who organised protests — they were exercising their right of expression. The publishers who refused to stock the novel were making a commercial and moral judgment. These are all legitimate responses within a free society.
[00:20:19] The third question is perhaps the hardest to square, and it is about offence.
[00:20:27] In most liberal democracies, there are protections against “hate speech”, against “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.”
[00:20:43] But there is no right not to be offended.
[00:20:47] These are not the same thing.
[00:20:50] Those laws are meant to protect people. The target is speech that degrades, threatens, or incites hostility against people because of who they are.
[00:21:03] The Satanic Verses did not fit that definition. It did not say Islam was inferior, or that Muslims were dangerous or deserved ridicule.
[00:21:15] It was a literary work that played with Islamic history in ways that many Muslims found deeply offensive. That is a different thing.
[00:21:26] Religious beliefs are ideas. And in a free society, ideas can be questioned, challenged, even mocked. That is rather the point. You cannot hold a political opinion, a philosophical position, or a scientific theory above criticism simply by declaring it sacred.
[00:21:50] But religion is not, emotionally or socially, quite like choosing an opinion or a political party. For many people, their faith is not just a set of beliefs they happen to hold. It's their identity, their community, their whole understanding of the world.
[00:22:11] To attack the faith is, for them, to attack the person, the individual, and their entire world.
[00:22:21] And this brings us back to blasphemy itself.
[00:22:25] As you’ve heard, blasphemy was abolished as a crime in Britain in 2008. No idea, no matter how sacred to however many people, can be placed beyond challenge by law.
[00:22:40] But as you can see from this whole affair, in the case of Salman Rushdie, it almost didn’t matter.
[00:22:48] Yes, he was protected by UK law.
[00:22:52] But the law of one liberal democracy could not fully protect him against a transnational campaign of religiously framed intimidation.
[00:23:02] A religious leader in another country declared that he deserved to die, and the sentence has followed him around the world for more than thirty years.
[00:23:13] His translators were stabbed. His publishers were shot. His life became a series of safe houses.
[00:23:21] And when he thought he was safe, a young man he had never met tried to murder him, and almost did.
[00:23:30] So the question that remains is not whether blasphemy should be a crime.
[00:23:36] My view on that is that in a truly free society, the answer must surely be no.
[00:23:42] Everyone deserves protection from threats, discrimination, and hatred, but ideas and beliefs do not deserve immunity from criticism.
[00:23:51] The question perhaps is what we owe to people who write things that others consider blasphemous.
[00:23:58] Is "you have the right to write it" really a good enough answer when what follows is a death sentence, years in hiding, and the murder of a man who only translated the book?
[00:24:11] Rushdie himself never wavered on the principle. He has continued to argue, to this very day, that the imagination must be free. That to accept any other position was to hand a veto to whoever was willing to threaten the most violence.
[00:24:30] And for that principle, he paid a price that most people who hold that a similar view will never be asked to pay.
[00:24:40] OK then, that is it for this three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:24:46] We started with a student in Edinburgh in 1697. We ended with a novelist in New York in 2022. In between, three centuries of argument about who has the right to say what, who gets to judge, and what happens to those who test the limits.
[00:25:03] I hope you found it as interesting to listen to as I found it to research and write.
[00:25:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part three, the final part, of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:30] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in the English-speaking world, from a student hanged in Edinburgh to the abolition of blasphemy law in 2008 to modern calls to bring it back.
[00:00:42] In part two, we told the first part of the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book, the protests, who Khomeini was, and the fatwa of Valentine's Day 1989.
[00:00:55] Today, we’ll pick up the story where we left off, so if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, now is the time to press pause and listen to that one.
[00:01:06] OK, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I said we’d pick up the story directly where we left off, on the 14th of February, 1989, after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
[00:01:27] If you’ll allow me, first I’d like to transport you a few decades later, to the 12th of August, 2022.
[00:01:38] The setting for what I’m about to describe is not a hidden safe house in the English countryside or some secret apartment in Mumbai; it is the Chautauqua Institution, a nineteenth-century adult education retreat on the shores of a lake in western New York state.
[00:01:59] Every summer, thousands of people come here for lectures and discussions. It's quiet, thoughtful, and civilised. It’s exactly the kind of place you might go to hear a famous novelist give a talk.
[00:02:16] Salman Rushdie is on the stage.
[00:02:20] He is seventy-five years old.
[00:02:22] He is, by this point, a celebrated figure in New York literary life. He is visible, accessible, a regular at events and dinner parties.
[00:02:35] He still has a security detail, but the years of hiding are long behind him.
[00:02:43] He has written many books since The Satanic Verses. He has been knighted by the Queen, so he is Sir Salman Rushdie, to give him his proper title.
[00:02:54] He is, as far as anyone can tell, safe.
[00:02:59] It’s early morning, and Rushdie is about to speak to the crowd of literary enthusiasts.
[00:03:06] Suddenly, a young man with a black mask jumps onto the stage and rushes towards the celebrated author.
[00:03:15] He pulls out a knife and stabs Rushdie repeatedly, fifteen times, before anyone can stop him.
[00:03:24] Rushdie is airlifted to hospital, with the doctors reporting that it’s touch and go.
[00:03:31] The injuries nearly kill him. He loses the sight in one eye, and the use of one hand, but he survives.
[00:03:41] The attacker is apprehended at the scene. He is a twenty-four-year-old Lebanese-American from New Jersey.
[00:03:50] The police don’t have to scratch their heads too much as to a motive, but it turns out that the would-be killer had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:03] He was not motivated, he said, by the offensive content of the novel, but rather his admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:04:13] Now, Rushdie almost died, but he was not the only victim of the Ayatollah’s fatwa.
[00:04:21] And indeed, to clarify, the fatwa was not limited to Rushdie alone, but rather anyone connected with the book. Everyone who had helped to spread it, through translating, publishing, and selling this blasphemous work.
[00:04:38] The first attack had come two years after the fatwa.
[00:04:43] Hitoshi Igarashi was a professor at Tsukuba University in Japan. He was the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:53] On the 11th of July, 1991, he was stabbed to death in his office at the university.
[00:05:01] He was forty-four years old.
[00:05:03] His killer was never identified. And the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:05:10] The same month, in Milan, the Italian translator of the novel, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked in his apartment. He was stabbed several times and left for dead.
[00:05:23] Fortunately, he survived.
[00:05:26] In October 1993, William Nygaard — the Norwegian publisher of the book — was shot three times outside his home in Oslo.
[00:05:37] He survived, but barely.
[00:05:41] And in the weeks after the fatwa, bookshops in Britain received bomb threats. Two were bombed. Several American chains of bookshops removed the novel from their shelves.
[00:05:54] This was a powerful message; touch this book, do anything that helps spread its message, and you will be putting your life in danger.
[00:06:06] The effect on the publishing world was real and lasting.
[00:06:11] After the Rushdie affair, publishers around the world became more cautious about books that might attract similar responses.
[00:06:20] Some editors declined projects they might otherwise have taken on. The calculation behind a publishing decision began to include a question it had never previously included: could someone get killed for this?
[00:06:36] This is what Rushdie has called the true cost of the fatwa — not just what happened to him, but the invisible books that were never written, never published, never translated, because someone somewhere decided the risk was too high.
[00:06:54] Now, while all of this was happening, Rushdie had disappeared.
[00:06:59] Not entirely. But the life he had been living — the dinners, the literary events, the freedom to walk down a street on a whim — it all ended the day the news came through.
[00:07:13] He was given a cover name: Joseph Anton, which he took from the first names of two writers he admired, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
[00:07:23] He used that name for nearly a decade.
[00:07:27] He has written about his daily reality in a memoir titled Joseph Anton. He chose, interestingly, to write about himself in the third person — as "he" rather than "I" — as though describing someone else entirely.
[00:07:46] What he describes is an existence of constant movement and constant precaution. Safe houses. Police escorts. The total loss of spontaneity. Every journey, every appearance, every dinner at a friend's house requiring advance planning and negotiation with his protection team.
[00:08:08] He writes about the small things.
[00:08:10] The first time he was able to browse in a bookshop — just standing in front of a shelf, looking at the spines — without a bodyguard at his shoulder.
[00:08:22] It took years before he was able to do this.
[00:08:26] He has described the whole experience as a kind of living death.
[00:08:31] He was alive.
[00:08:33] But he was not free.
[00:08:36] And as you might imagine, while Rushdie was forced into hiding, the literary world was arguing.
[00:08:45] Some rallied to Rushdie's defence with complete conviction.
[00:08:50] Others said he had brought it on himself.
[00:08:54] This debate ran on for months. It was fierce, and played out in newspaper columns and television panels.
[00:09:03] One of the most prominent voices was John le Carré, the celebrated author of spy novels like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
[00:09:14] He wrote a piece arguing that freedom of expression was not unlimited, that a writer had a responsibility to consider the consequences of their words, and that Rushdie had been reckless.
[00:09:30] Rushdie’s reply was simple: the moment you accept that a writer must soften their work because a group of people may react violently, you have handed that group a veto.
[00:09:45] Not through the law, but through the threat of violence.
[00:09:51] And if you grant that veto, you have not protected anyone. You have simply made violence an effective tool for silencing people.
[00:10:01] The exchange ran for weeks, in letters and articles in the British press. Two of the most celebrated novelists in Britain, arguing in public about the most fundamental questions in literature.
[00:10:16] The children’s author Roald Dahl went even further.
[00:10:21] He published a piece calling Rushdie a "dangerous opportunist" who had deliberately set out to provoke Muslims and had shown no care for what he was unleashing on others.
[00:10:33] On the other side, the famous essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens, became one of the most vocal defenders of Rushdie.
[00:10:43] Hitchens went further than most. He argued that the fatwa was not primarily a religious matter at all. It was a political act — a deliberate attempt by the Iranian state to intimidate writers, publishers, and governments around the world into accepting that certain subjects were off-limits.
[00:11:05] The correct response, he argued, was not sympathy or concessions. It was to defend free expression without qualification.
[00:11:15] As the old saying goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
[00:11:24] But the debate was not just between famous names in newspapers.
[00:11:30] After the fatwa, journalists took to the streets of Britain, travelling to Bradford and Birmingham to ask local British Muslims what they thought of the fatwa.
[00:11:43] What many viewers found unsettling was not just what some people said, but who was saying it.
[00:11:52] These were not distant figures from some foreign world, elderly men with thick accents in traditional dress. Many were young men who had grown up in Britain, gone to school in Britain, and spoke with local English accents.
[00:12:08] They wore jeans and played football.
[00:12:12] And some of them said, quite calmly, that Rushdie deserved to die.
[00:12:18] Some added that they wouldn’t necessarily do it themselves, while others proudly declared that if they had the chance, they would kill him.
[00:12:28] For a certain kind of liberal Britain, these interviews were deeply troubling.
[00:12:34] They suggested that integration, and the idea that second-generation immigrants would naturally absorb British values about free speech and tolerance, well, it was not happening in the way people had assumed.
[00:12:50] Or that it was happening alongside a religious identity that could, on certain questions, override it.
[00:12:59] Now, whether that reading was fair or not is a different debate.
[00:13:04] But the images stuck.
[00:13:07] Capital punishment had been effectively abolished two decades earlier, and the last case of someone being executed for blasphemy was three centuries earlier.
[00:13:18] Yet the BBC was showing footage of young British men nodding their heads to the command by a head of a foreign state that a prominent British citizen should be killed for his words.
[00:13:33] Now, to clarify, of course there was not one uniform opinion in the British Asian community.
[00:13:41] Many disagreed with it, and the TV programmes that showed interviews with people supporting the fatwa also included interviews with people who disagreed with it.
[00:13:52] But in the public imagination, they were often lumped together into one frightening picture.
[00:13:59] And in a perhaps even more surreal turn of events, the singer Cat Stevens got caught up in this affair.
[00:14:08] He was one of the most beloved British singer-songwriters of the 1970s: classics like Wild World and Father and Son.
[00:14:17] He had converted to Islam in 1977, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and stepped away from music. He was probably the most famous British convert to Islam.
[00:14:31] And so, in 1989, shortly after the fatwa was issued, he was asked what he thought of it.
[00:14:39] And he responded that it was clear: Rushdie deserved to die for insulting the prophet Muhammad.
[00:14:48] It was all over the news, with headlines like “Cat says kill Rushdie”, and it has dogged him ever since.
[00:14:57] In later interviews, Stevens distanced himself from these remarks, and said they had been taken out of context and he didn’t really understand what he was talking about.
[00:15:08] Still, for many people watching, it was a disorientating moment; this British singer siding with an Iranian cleric rather than the laws of his own country.
[00:15:22] Now, while all of this was being argued in newspapers and television studios, the diplomatic and political fallout was playing out at a different level.
[00:15:33] The reaction in the Western world was almost uniformly one of condemnation.
[00:15:39] The British government recalled its ambassador from Tehran. Iran recalled its ambassador from London. Diplomatic relations were suspended.
[00:15:50] The European Community issued a joint condemnation. Writers and intellectuals around the world rallied to Rushdie's defence. PEN International, the organisation that campaigns for freedom of expression, made his case a defining cause.
[00:16:08] No religious authority, in any country, had the right to sentence a writer to death for a work of fiction.
[00:16:17] Rushdie responded to the pressure by issuing a statement expressing regret for the distress caused to sincere Muslim believers.
[00:16:28] It was a half-apology, and importantly, he did not retract anything.
[00:16:35] And Khomeini too stuck to his guns. He issued a follow-up clarification: even if Rushdie repented and became the most devout man alive, it would remain the duty of every Muslim to carry out the sentence.
[00:16:51] There was no way back.
[00:16:55] Now, Khomeini died in June 1989, four months after the fatwa.
[00:17:02] After his death, he ascended to an almost prophetic status; nothing he said could be questioned.
[00:17:11] His successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, reaffirmed it.
[00:17:15] But the practical situation began, slowly, to change.
[00:17:22] In 1998, the Iranian government under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made a public statement: Iran would not support the carrying out of the fatwa and considered the matter resolved.
[00:17:37] This, however, was not the same as lifting it.
[00:17:41] But it changed the calculation. Rushdie's protection was scaled back. He began to travel more freely. He moved to New York. He resumed a public life.
[00:17:55] Over time, he seemed, by all appearances, safe.
[00:18:00] Which brings us back to Chautauqua.
[00:18:03] To Hadi Matar, who had never been to Iran, who had not been recruited by any organisation, and who had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:16] He had read enough. He had watched the videos of Khomeini online and decided that he would do as the Ayatollah had commanded.
[00:18:26] As you heard, Rushdie survived. He lost an eye and the movement in one hand, but he has continued to write. A memoir of the attack itself, suitably titled Knife.
[00:18:40] And now he is back to writing fiction.
[00:18:44] He published a collection of short stories last year, in 2025, and says he plans to keep on writing until he no longer can.
[00:18:54] Now, perhaps the Rushdie affair can feel like a story from another era, a religious declaration being issued by an old man born at the turn of the 20th century.
[00:19:07] In reality, the questions the affair raised are still far from resolved.
[00:19:13] The first question is the one le Carré and Rushdie were arguing about: does freedom of expression come with responsibilities? Can a writer write whatever they want, or should they take into account the perspective of people who might be offended by their words?
[00:19:32] The second is about what freedom of expression actually means.
[00:19:38] Freedom of expression, in liberal democracies at least, is a protection against the state. It means the government cannot arrest you, silence you, or punish you for what you say or write.
[00:19:52] It does not mean freedom from other people's reactions.
[00:19:56] The Muslim communities in Bradford who burned the book, who wrote to their MPs, who organised protests — they were exercising their right of expression. The publishers who refused to stock the novel were making a commercial and moral judgment. These are all legitimate responses within a free society.
[00:20:19] The third question is perhaps the hardest to square, and it is about offence.
[00:20:27] In most liberal democracies, there are protections against “hate speech”, against “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.”
[00:20:43] But there is no right not to be offended.
[00:20:47] These are not the same thing.
[00:20:50] Those laws are meant to protect people. The target is speech that degrades, threatens, or incites hostility against people because of who they are.
[00:21:03] The Satanic Verses did not fit that definition. It did not say Islam was inferior, or that Muslims were dangerous or deserved ridicule.
[00:21:15] It was a literary work that played with Islamic history in ways that many Muslims found deeply offensive. That is a different thing.
[00:21:26] Religious beliefs are ideas. And in a free society, ideas can be questioned, challenged, even mocked. That is rather the point. You cannot hold a political opinion, a philosophical position, or a scientific theory above criticism simply by declaring it sacred.
[00:21:50] But religion is not, emotionally or socially, quite like choosing an opinion or a political party. For many people, their faith is not just a set of beliefs they happen to hold. It's their identity, their community, their whole understanding of the world.
[00:22:11] To attack the faith is, for them, to attack the person, the individual, and their entire world.
[00:22:21] And this brings us back to blasphemy itself.
[00:22:25] As you’ve heard, blasphemy was abolished as a crime in Britain in 2008. No idea, no matter how sacred to however many people, can be placed beyond challenge by law.
[00:22:40] But as you can see from this whole affair, in the case of Salman Rushdie, it almost didn’t matter.
[00:22:48] Yes, he was protected by UK law.
[00:22:52] But the law of one liberal democracy could not fully protect him against a transnational campaign of religiously framed intimidation.
[00:23:02] A religious leader in another country declared that he deserved to die, and the sentence has followed him around the world for more than thirty years.
[00:23:13] His translators were stabbed. His publishers were shot. His life became a series of safe houses.
[00:23:21] And when he thought he was safe, a young man he had never met tried to murder him, and almost did.
[00:23:30] So the question that remains is not whether blasphemy should be a crime.
[00:23:36] My view on that is that in a truly free society, the answer must surely be no.
[00:23:42] Everyone deserves protection from threats, discrimination, and hatred, but ideas and beliefs do not deserve immunity from criticism.
[00:23:51] The question perhaps is what we owe to people who write things that others consider blasphemous.
[00:23:58] Is "you have the right to write it" really a good enough answer when what follows is a death sentence, years in hiding, and the murder of a man who only translated the book?
[00:24:11] Rushdie himself never wavered on the principle. He has continued to argue, to this very day, that the imagination must be free. That to accept any other position was to hand a veto to whoever was willing to threaten the most violence.
[00:24:30] And for that principle, he paid a price that most people who hold that a similar view will never be asked to pay.
[00:24:40] OK then, that is it for this three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:24:46] We started with a student in Edinburgh in 1697. We ended with a novelist in New York in 2022. In between, three centuries of argument about who has the right to say what, who gets to judge, and what happens to those who test the limits.
[00:25:03] I hope you found it as interesting to listen to as I found it to research and write.
[00:25:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part three, the final part, of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:30] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in the English-speaking world, from a student hanged in Edinburgh to the abolition of blasphemy law in 2008 to modern calls to bring it back.
[00:00:42] In part two, we told the first part of the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses — the book, the protests, who Khomeini was, and the fatwa of Valentine's Day 1989.
[00:00:55] Today, we’ll pick up the story where we left off, so if you haven’t listened to the previous episode, now is the time to press pause and listen to that one.
[00:01:06] OK, with that disclaimer out of the way, let’s get right into it.
[00:01:13] I said we’d pick up the story directly where we left off, on the 14th of February, 1989, after the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie.
[00:01:27] If you’ll allow me, first I’d like to transport you a few decades later, to the 12th of August, 2022.
[00:01:38] The setting for what I’m about to describe is not a hidden safe house in the English countryside or some secret apartment in Mumbai; it is the Chautauqua Institution, a nineteenth-century adult education retreat on the shores of a lake in western New York state.
[00:01:59] Every summer, thousands of people come here for lectures and discussions. It's quiet, thoughtful, and civilised. It’s exactly the kind of place you might go to hear a famous novelist give a talk.
[00:02:16] Salman Rushdie is on the stage.
[00:02:20] He is seventy-five years old.
[00:02:22] He is, by this point, a celebrated figure in New York literary life. He is visible, accessible, a regular at events and dinner parties.
[00:02:35] He still has a security detail, but the years of hiding are long behind him.
[00:02:43] He has written many books since The Satanic Verses. He has been knighted by the Queen, so he is Sir Salman Rushdie, to give him his proper title.
[00:02:54] He is, as far as anyone can tell, safe.
[00:02:59] It’s early morning, and Rushdie is about to speak to the crowd of literary enthusiasts.
[00:03:06] Suddenly, a young man with a black mask jumps onto the stage and rushes towards the celebrated author.
[00:03:15] He pulls out a knife and stabs Rushdie repeatedly, fifteen times, before anyone can stop him.
[00:03:24] Rushdie is airlifted to hospital, with the doctors reporting that it’s touch and go.
[00:03:31] The injuries nearly kill him. He loses the sight in one eye, and the use of one hand, but he survives.
[00:03:41] The attacker is apprehended at the scene. He is a twenty-four-year-old Lebanese-American from New Jersey.
[00:03:50] The police don’t have to scratch their heads too much as to a motive, but it turns out that the would-be killer had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:03] He was not motivated, he said, by the offensive content of the novel, but rather his admiration for Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:04:13] Now, Rushdie almost died, but he was not the only victim of the Ayatollah’s fatwa.
[00:04:21] And indeed, to clarify, the fatwa was not limited to Rushdie alone, but rather anyone connected with the book. Everyone who had helped to spread it, through translating, publishing, and selling this blasphemous work.
[00:04:38] The first attack had come two years after the fatwa.
[00:04:43] Hitoshi Igarashi was a professor at Tsukuba University in Japan. He was the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses.
[00:04:53] On the 11th of July, 1991, he was stabbed to death in his office at the university.
[00:05:01] He was forty-four years old.
[00:05:03] His killer was never identified. And the case remains officially unsolved.
[00:05:10] The same month, in Milan, the Italian translator of the novel, Ettore Capriolo, was attacked in his apartment. He was stabbed several times and left for dead.
[00:05:23] Fortunately, he survived.
[00:05:26] In October 1993, William Nygaard — the Norwegian publisher of the book — was shot three times outside his home in Oslo.
[00:05:37] He survived, but barely.
[00:05:41] And in the weeks after the fatwa, bookshops in Britain received bomb threats. Two were bombed. Several American chains of bookshops removed the novel from their shelves.
[00:05:54] This was a powerful message; touch this book, do anything that helps spread its message, and you will be putting your life in danger.
[00:06:06] The effect on the publishing world was real and lasting.
[00:06:11] After the Rushdie affair, publishers around the world became more cautious about books that might attract similar responses.
[00:06:20] Some editors declined projects they might otherwise have taken on. The calculation behind a publishing decision began to include a question it had never previously included: could someone get killed for this?
[00:06:36] This is what Rushdie has called the true cost of the fatwa — not just what happened to him, but the invisible books that were never written, never published, never translated, because someone somewhere decided the risk was too high.
[00:06:54] Now, while all of this was happening, Rushdie had disappeared.
[00:06:59] Not entirely. But the life he had been living — the dinners, the literary events, the freedom to walk down a street on a whim — it all ended the day the news came through.
[00:07:13] He was given a cover name: Joseph Anton, which he took from the first names of two writers he admired, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
[00:07:23] He used that name for nearly a decade.
[00:07:27] He has written about his daily reality in a memoir titled Joseph Anton. He chose, interestingly, to write about himself in the third person — as "he" rather than "I" — as though describing someone else entirely.
[00:07:46] What he describes is an existence of constant movement and constant precaution. Safe houses. Police escorts. The total loss of spontaneity. Every journey, every appearance, every dinner at a friend's house requiring advance planning and negotiation with his protection team.
[00:08:08] He writes about the small things.
[00:08:10] The first time he was able to browse in a bookshop — just standing in front of a shelf, looking at the spines — without a bodyguard at his shoulder.
[00:08:22] It took years before he was able to do this.
[00:08:26] He has described the whole experience as a kind of living death.
[00:08:31] He was alive.
[00:08:33] But he was not free.
[00:08:36] And as you might imagine, while Rushdie was forced into hiding, the literary world was arguing.
[00:08:45] Some rallied to Rushdie's defence with complete conviction.
[00:08:50] Others said he had brought it on himself.
[00:08:54] This debate ran on for months. It was fierce, and played out in newspaper columns and television panels.
[00:09:03] One of the most prominent voices was John le Carré, the celebrated author of spy novels like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
[00:09:14] He wrote a piece arguing that freedom of expression was not unlimited, that a writer had a responsibility to consider the consequences of their words, and that Rushdie had been reckless.
[00:09:30] Rushdie’s reply was simple: the moment you accept that a writer must soften their work because a group of people may react violently, you have handed that group a veto.
[00:09:45] Not through the law, but through the threat of violence.
[00:09:51] And if you grant that veto, you have not protected anyone. You have simply made violence an effective tool for silencing people.
[00:10:01] The exchange ran for weeks, in letters and articles in the British press. Two of the most celebrated novelists in Britain, arguing in public about the most fundamental questions in literature.
[00:10:16] The children’s author Roald Dahl went even further.
[00:10:21] He published a piece calling Rushdie a "dangerous opportunist" who had deliberately set out to provoke Muslims and had shown no care for what he was unleashing on others.
[00:10:33] On the other side, the famous essayist and journalist, Christopher Hitchens, became one of the most vocal defenders of Rushdie.
[00:10:43] Hitchens went further than most. He argued that the fatwa was not primarily a religious matter at all. It was a political act — a deliberate attempt by the Iranian state to intimidate writers, publishers, and governments around the world into accepting that certain subjects were off-limits.
[00:11:05] The correct response, he argued, was not sympathy or concessions. It was to defend free expression without qualification.
[00:11:15] As the old saying goes, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
[00:11:24] But the debate was not just between famous names in newspapers.
[00:11:30] After the fatwa, journalists took to the streets of Britain, travelling to Bradford and Birmingham to ask local British Muslims what they thought of the fatwa.
[00:11:43] What many viewers found unsettling was not just what some people said, but who was saying it.
[00:11:52] These were not distant figures from some foreign world, elderly men with thick accents in traditional dress. Many were young men who had grown up in Britain, gone to school in Britain, and spoke with local English accents.
[00:12:08] They wore jeans and played football.
[00:12:12] And some of them said, quite calmly, that Rushdie deserved to die.
[00:12:18] Some added that they wouldn’t necessarily do it themselves, while others proudly declared that if they had the chance, they would kill him.
[00:12:28] For a certain kind of liberal Britain, these interviews were deeply troubling.
[00:12:34] They suggested that integration, and the idea that second-generation immigrants would naturally absorb British values about free speech and tolerance, well, it was not happening in the way people had assumed.
[00:12:50] Or that it was happening alongside a religious identity that could, on certain questions, override it.
[00:12:59] Now, whether that reading was fair or not is a different debate.
[00:13:04] But the images stuck.
[00:13:07] Capital punishment had been effectively abolished two decades earlier, and the last case of someone being executed for blasphemy was three centuries earlier.
[00:13:18] Yet the BBC was showing footage of young British men nodding their heads to the command by a head of a foreign state that a prominent British citizen should be killed for his words.
[00:13:33] Now, to clarify, of course there was not one uniform opinion in the British Asian community.
[00:13:41] Many disagreed with it, and the TV programmes that showed interviews with people supporting the fatwa also included interviews with people who disagreed with it.
[00:13:52] But in the public imagination, they were often lumped together into one frightening picture.
[00:13:59] And in a perhaps even more surreal turn of events, the singer Cat Stevens got caught up in this affair.
[00:14:08] He was one of the most beloved British singer-songwriters of the 1970s: classics like Wild World and Father and Son.
[00:14:17] He had converted to Islam in 1977, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and stepped away from music. He was probably the most famous British convert to Islam.
[00:14:31] And so, in 1989, shortly after the fatwa was issued, he was asked what he thought of it.
[00:14:39] And he responded that it was clear: Rushdie deserved to die for insulting the prophet Muhammad.
[00:14:48] It was all over the news, with headlines like “Cat says kill Rushdie”, and it has dogged him ever since.
[00:14:57] In later interviews, Stevens distanced himself from these remarks, and said they had been taken out of context and he didn’t really understand what he was talking about.
[00:15:08] Still, for many people watching, it was a disorientating moment; this British singer siding with an Iranian cleric rather than the laws of his own country.
[00:15:22] Now, while all of this was being argued in newspapers and television studios, the diplomatic and political fallout was playing out at a different level.
[00:15:33] The reaction in the Western world was almost uniformly one of condemnation.
[00:15:39] The British government recalled its ambassador from Tehran. Iran recalled its ambassador from London. Diplomatic relations were suspended.
[00:15:50] The European Community issued a joint condemnation. Writers and intellectuals around the world rallied to Rushdie's defence. PEN International, the organisation that campaigns for freedom of expression, made his case a defining cause.
[00:16:08] No religious authority, in any country, had the right to sentence a writer to death for a work of fiction.
[00:16:17] Rushdie responded to the pressure by issuing a statement expressing regret for the distress caused to sincere Muslim believers.
[00:16:28] It was a half-apology, and importantly, he did not retract anything.
[00:16:35] And Khomeini too stuck to his guns. He issued a follow-up clarification: even if Rushdie repented and became the most devout man alive, it would remain the duty of every Muslim to carry out the sentence.
[00:16:51] There was no way back.
[00:16:55] Now, Khomeini died in June 1989, four months after the fatwa.
[00:17:02] After his death, he ascended to an almost prophetic status; nothing he said could be questioned.
[00:17:11] His successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, reaffirmed it.
[00:17:15] But the practical situation began, slowly, to change.
[00:17:22] In 1998, the Iranian government under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made a public statement: Iran would not support the carrying out of the fatwa and considered the matter resolved.
[00:17:37] This, however, was not the same as lifting it.
[00:17:41] But it changed the calculation. Rushdie's protection was scaled back. He began to travel more freely. He moved to New York. He resumed a public life.
[00:17:55] Over time, he seemed, by all appearances, safe.
[00:18:00] Which brings us back to Chautauqua.
[00:18:03] To Hadi Matar, who had never been to Iran, who had not been recruited by any organisation, and who had only read a couple of pages of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:16] He had read enough. He had watched the videos of Khomeini online and decided that he would do as the Ayatollah had commanded.
[00:18:26] As you heard, Rushdie survived. He lost an eye and the movement in one hand, but he has continued to write. A memoir of the attack itself, suitably titled Knife.
[00:18:40] And now he is back to writing fiction.
[00:18:44] He published a collection of short stories last year, in 2025, and says he plans to keep on writing until he no longer can.
[00:18:54] Now, perhaps the Rushdie affair can feel like a story from another era, a religious declaration being issued by an old man born at the turn of the 20th century.
[00:19:07] In reality, the questions the affair raised are still far from resolved.
[00:19:13] The first question is the one le Carré and Rushdie were arguing about: does freedom of expression come with responsibilities? Can a writer write whatever they want, or should they take into account the perspective of people who might be offended by their words?
[00:19:32] The second is about what freedom of expression actually means.
[00:19:38] Freedom of expression, in liberal democracies at least, is a protection against the state. It means the government cannot arrest you, silence you, or punish you for what you say or write.
[00:19:52] It does not mean freedom from other people's reactions.
[00:19:56] The Muslim communities in Bradford who burned the book, who wrote to their MPs, who organised protests — they were exercising their right of expression. The publishers who refused to stock the novel were making a commercial and moral judgment. These are all legitimate responses within a free society.
[00:20:19] The third question is perhaps the hardest to square, and it is about offence.
[00:20:27] In most liberal democracies, there are protections against “hate speech”, against “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.”
[00:20:43] But there is no right not to be offended.
[00:20:47] These are not the same thing.
[00:20:50] Those laws are meant to protect people. The target is speech that degrades, threatens, or incites hostility against people because of who they are.
[00:21:03] The Satanic Verses did not fit that definition. It did not say Islam was inferior, or that Muslims were dangerous or deserved ridicule.
[00:21:15] It was a literary work that played with Islamic history in ways that many Muslims found deeply offensive. That is a different thing.
[00:21:26] Religious beliefs are ideas. And in a free society, ideas can be questioned, challenged, even mocked. That is rather the point. You cannot hold a political opinion, a philosophical position, or a scientific theory above criticism simply by declaring it sacred.
[00:21:50] But religion is not, emotionally or socially, quite like choosing an opinion or a political party. For many people, their faith is not just a set of beliefs they happen to hold. It's their identity, their community, their whole understanding of the world.
[00:22:11] To attack the faith is, for them, to attack the person, the individual, and their entire world.
[00:22:21] And this brings us back to blasphemy itself.
[00:22:25] As you’ve heard, blasphemy was abolished as a crime in Britain in 2008. No idea, no matter how sacred to however many people, can be placed beyond challenge by law.
[00:22:40] But as you can see from this whole affair, in the case of Salman Rushdie, it almost didn’t matter.
[00:22:48] Yes, he was protected by UK law.
[00:22:52] But the law of one liberal democracy could not fully protect him against a transnational campaign of religiously framed intimidation.
[00:23:02] A religious leader in another country declared that he deserved to die, and the sentence has followed him around the world for more than thirty years.
[00:23:13] His translators were stabbed. His publishers were shot. His life became a series of safe houses.
[00:23:21] And when he thought he was safe, a young man he had never met tried to murder him, and almost did.
[00:23:30] So the question that remains is not whether blasphemy should be a crime.
[00:23:36] My view on that is that in a truly free society, the answer must surely be no.
[00:23:42] Everyone deserves protection from threats, discrimination, and hatred, but ideas and beliefs do not deserve immunity from criticism.
[00:23:51] The question perhaps is what we owe to people who write things that others consider blasphemous.
[00:23:58] Is "you have the right to write it" really a good enough answer when what follows is a death sentence, years in hiding, and the murder of a man who only translated the book?
[00:24:11] Rushdie himself never wavered on the principle. He has continued to argue, to this very day, that the imagination must be free. That to accept any other position was to hand a veto to whoever was willing to threaten the most violence.
[00:24:30] And for that principle, he paid a price that most people who hold that a similar view will never be asked to pay.
[00:24:40] OK then, that is it for this three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:24:46] We started with a student in Edinburgh in 1697. We ended with a novelist in New York in 2022. In between, three centuries of argument about who has the right to say what, who gets to judge, and what happens to those who test the limits.
[00:25:03] I hope you found it as interesting to listen to as I found it to research and write.
[00:25:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
