TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/030689/03068900.026

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 13KB | 226 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Khamenei, declares that the death sentence might be rescinded if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.