TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/030689/03068900.026

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 12.8 KB | 247 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 36

TERRORISM

The New Satans


As the West wakes up, Khomeini confirms that the real fight is
in Iran

By William E. Smith


    The story thus far: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie,
41, is in hiding somewhere in England. He lives under a death
threat imposed by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who charges
that Rushdie's new novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous
and an insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered
a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner.
The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader
would issue a death threat against a British subject who has
merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be
sure, occasionally deals with Islam in a fanciful and irreverent
way.

    A few days later, one of Khomeini's colleagues, President
Ali Khamenei, declares that the death sentence might be
rescinded if only Rushdie would repent. Rushdie duly issues a
formal apology, saying he meant no insult to true believers.
Will Khomeini forgive him? Will the death sentence be lifted?
Absolutely not. The Ayatullah is made of sterner stuff than
that. The very next day the Iranian revolutionary leader, 88,
issued a statement rejecting Rushdie's apology and declaring
flatly, "It is incumbent on every Muslim to do everything
possible to send him to hell." Three days later, in a speech to a
group of Iranian clerics, Khomeini added that nothing, not even
Western economic sanctions, would "force us to retreat and forgo
implementation of God's decree."

    In the first days after the Ayatullah's shocking death
threat, governments and the general public alike in the U.S.
and Western Europe were slow to react. Who could believe that
a book that practically nobody had read -- and an often obscure
if sometimes brilliant one, at that -- was the catalyst
precipitating a bizarre international crisis?

    But as Khomeini repeated his threat again and again, Western
governments at last began to take action. Led by Britain and
strongly supported by West Germany, the twelve members of the
European Community voted to withdraw their top-ranking diplomats
from Tehran in protest. So did Canada, Sweden and Norway. Iran
swiftly retaliated by pulling most of its own ambassadors out
of Western Europe.

    Some Americans found the Bush Administration surprisingly
slow and reserved in its response. But at midweek the President
finally stepped up to the White House lectern and criticized
Khomeini's death sentence as "deeply offensive to the norms of
civilized behavior." Bush warned that Washington would hold
Iran accountable for "any actions against U.S interests."  While
it was the strongest statement thus far from anyone in the
Government, there was little more that the Administration could
do. The U.S. had no diplomatic pawns to move, nor had it ever
ended the trade embargo imposed on Iran in 1979. In fact, the
Bush Administration seemed to be acting with considerable
restraint, perhaps to protect the nine American hostages still
in the hands of fanatic Muslims linked to Iran. Much of the
week's most vocal outrage came from writers and publishers, who
belatedly rallied to Rushdie's defense. Not a word was heard
from Moscow.

    For the West, the issue largely seemed to resolve itself
into a question of free speech. But in Iran, a vastly different
phenomenon was taking shape: the Ayatullah had seized upon
Rushdie's book as a flaming spear with which to halt his
country's creeping trend toward moderation. Within days, the
"liberals" who had seemed to be in the ascendant in Tehran
dropped from sight. They had been trying to strengthen
diplomatic and economic ties with the West in order to rebuild
the country following its disastrous eight-year war with Iraq.

    The most astonishing ideological pirouette was performed by
President Khamenei, who had seemingly tried to defuse the crisis
a few days earlier when he spoke of Rushdie's possible
repentance. But Khamenei sounded almost as fierce as the
Ayatullah last week, saying of the death edict, "The long black
arrow has been slung and is now traveling toward its target.
There is nothing more that can be done." Western governments, he
added, had made the mistake of confusing "freedom of expression
with the freedom to insult 1 billion Muslims."

    The most significant aspect of the Ayatullah's "send him to
hell" speech was his emphasis on the rifts within his own
government and his fears about the influence of those he called
"misled liberals." Said Khomeini: "We should not, for the sake
of pleasing several sellout liberals, act in a way that gives
the impression that the Islamic Republic of Iran is deviating
from its principled positions." Suddenly Rushdie's purported
blasphemy seemed minor compared with the sins of Iranian
officials who had dared support a renewal of ties with the
decadent West.

    Even worse in Khomeini's eyes was the fact that the liberals
had spoken cravenly against some of the clerical regime's
previous policies, including its obstinate prosecution of a war
that cost Iran an estimated 350,000 lives. In case anyone
doubted his aims, Khomeini told the clerics, "As long as I am
here, I will not let the government fall into the hands of the
liberals. As long as I am alive, I will never stop cutting off
the hands of agents of the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

    Who were these unnamed liberals in addition to Khamenei? One
was certainly parliamentary Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has
hinted that Iran should have ended the war in 1982, after
driving the invading Iraqis out of its territory. Within days,
he too chimed in with an attack on the West. "We know what our
duty is regarding those who are a partner in cursing the
Prophet," declared Rafsanjani. "The ground has been laid for a
vast battle between Islam on the one hand, and paganism and
arrogance on the other." But he tried to forestall stronger
reprisals from Europe in case anything should happen to
Rushdie. "If any Muslim carried out his duty," said Rafsanjani,
"this cannot have any link with the Islamic Republic of Iran."

    Another target was Khomeini's designated successor,
Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, 64, who recently acknowledged that
Iran's revolutionary leaders erred in isolating their country
from the rest of the world. Khomeini was deeply offended by
such talk. Dismissing the views of those who regard "martyrdom
and self-sacrifice" as "worthless," he declared last week, "I
formally apologize to the (families) of the martyred . . . and
ask God to accept me next to the martyrs of the imposed war." He
added, "We are not for a moment sorry for our actions during the
war."

    Tehran radio reported that the Iranian parliament fully
supported Khomeini's policy of "keeping aloof from the Great
Satan," the U.S., and "cutting relations with colonialist
Britain." One of the Tehran regime's leading hard-liners,
Premier Hussein Mousavi, accused the West of "cultural
conspiracy" and declared that "Iran's firm decisions on the
(Rushdie) issue will ensure the country's independence and
dignity." Small wonder that the best-known pragmatists had run
for cover.

    Muslim anger surfaced elsewhere, fueling American and
British fears for the safety of their hostages. In Lebanon, two
related pro-Iranian Shi`ite organizations, Hizballah and
Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, both believed to
be holding Western hostages, endorsed Khomeini's threat.
Islamic Jihad issued a vow to seek revenge against "all those
who take part in strong and ferocious campaigns against Islam."
The statement was accompanied by a Polaroid photograph of the
three American hostages, Alann Steen, Robert Polhill and Jesse
Turner, who were kidnaped from the campus of Beirut University
College more than two years ago. But the communique made no new
threats against their lives. In Bombay, 10,000 anti-Rushdie
protesters rampaged through the streets until police moved in.
When the rioters would not disperse, the police opened fire,
killing 13 and injuring more than 70.

    Compared with the uproar in Iran and the Indian
subcontinent, most of the Muslim reaction in the Middle East
was mild. Though a conference of theologians meeting in Mecca
denounced Rushdie as a "heretic and renegade" and reportedly
demanded he be tried in absentia in an Islamic country, others
argued that the case had been blown out of proportion. Hassan
Saab, an adviser to the Sunni Muslim Grand Mufti of Lebanon,
called Rushdie "an insignificant writer who has attacked a
great prophet." He asked, "What harm has befallen the Prophet?"
In Egypt the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque, Sheik Gad el-Haq
Ali Gad el-Haq, noted that the net effect of the furor had been
to increase the book's sales and profits "by astronomical
figures." It would be far better, he suggested, if Islamic
scholars prepared their own book refuting Rushdie's "lies." The
English-language Egyptian Gazette argued that the Ayatullah's
pronouncements "will do more to damage the image of Islam in the
West than any words of Mr. Rushdie." Concluded the paper:
"Without the outcry, the book might have sold some tens of
thousands of copies and then sunk into oblivion as being too
obscure for the general interest."

    Instead, it has become a best seller. In the U.S. the book's
first printing of 50,000 copies was sold out; a second printing
of 100,000 was due in a few days, but stores reported orders of
200,000 or more.

    Whatever the literary or theological merits of The Satanic
Verses, its commercial success is assured; yet for almost a
week, such leading chains as Waldenbooks, B. Dalton and Barnes &
Noble kept their remaining copies off the shelves. In New York
City the Authors Guild, the PEN American Center and the Writers
Guild of America (East) fired off letters of protest to the
bookstore chains, criticizing them for caving in to censorship
by terrorism.

    On Wednesday some 200 members of the National Writers Union
demonstrated in front of the Iranian mission to the United
Nations. And in New York City's SoHo district, 21 American
writers, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion,
met to exchange brave words and read passages from the Rushdie
novel. Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation,
received the loudest response when he said, "Until the threat of
murder by contract is lifted, all authors should declare
themselves as co- conspirators. It is time for all of us to don
the yellow star and end the hateful isolation of our
colleague." In a grander flight of moral outrage, Mailer told
the crowd, "Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain
our frail religion, which happens to be faith in the power of
words and our willingness to suffer for them."

    On a lighter note, Mailer said he suspected the odds against
a customer suffering harm while browsing at a bookstore were
close to 100,000 to 1. "Such odds, if widely promulgated," he
observed, "would have brought in many prospective customers
looking for the spice of a very small risk." Biographer Robert
Massie, president of the 6,500-member Authors Guild, offered a
practical suggestion: he urged writers to ask publishers to
withdraw their books from chains that had removed the Rushdie
novel from their shelves.

    Once again the bookstore chains bent with the wind. They had
suffered a direct hit earlier in the week when New York Times
columnist William Safire rebuked them: "Even for ever-merging
Big Publishing, below the bottom line is another line marked
`freedom.' " At midweek B. Dalton, which also owns the Barnes
& Noble stores, announced that "at the urging of an overwhelming
majority of its store managers and employees," it would again
stock the Rushdie novel. Waldenbooks said it would stick to its
policy of selling the book but not displaying it, though local
managers were permitted to put it on the shelves if they chose
to. For the moment, the talk was theoretical, since the book was
sold out in the U.S.

    As for Rushdie, he remained in hiding. With him was his
American wife, novelist Marianne Wiggins, who canceled her U.S.
book tour to promote her new novel, John Dollar.

    Rushdie's friends worried aloud about how he could make a
life for himself under the Ayatullah's threat of death. Would he
hire guards, or remain in seclusion, or retreat to some distant
land? Few held out any hope that Khomeini would simply change
his mind because the real victims of the Rushdie affair were not
only the hapless author and his wife but the 50 million citizens
of revolutionary Iran. After a decade of terror and death, the
country had seemed to be in the early stages of recovery. But
by his actions last week Khomeini brought that healing process
to a halt.