Attack on Salman Rushdie makes it imperative to defend the right to write freely

Salman Rushdie being loaded into a MedEvac helicopter after he and an interviewer were attacked while on stage at an event in Chautauqua, New York State, US, 12 August 2022. (Photo: EPA-EFE / @HoratioGates3 )

By J Brooks Spector

14 Aug 2022

The assault on Salman Rushdie at a public event dedicated to freedom of expression for writers seeking refuge in the US draws attention to the history of the site, the Chautauqua Institution, and even South Africa’s own encounter with the writer in the last years of apartheid.

The Chautauqua Institution was where author Salman Rushdie was about to be part of an eagerly awaited colloquy on the US as a safe (but perhaps sometimes troubling) space for writers seeking refuge from elsewhere. There he was, on the stage, ready to begin the conversation, and then he was, without warning, brutally assaulted by a young man wielding a knife.

Throughout its existence, Chautauqua and the larger educational movement that the original venue inspired became an important feature of US life for nearly a century and a half. In these times, Rushdie’s presence on its stage would have been fully in keeping with the institution’s grand vision.

Located in western New York state, set amidst farms, pristine lakes, picturesque towns, walking and riding trails, forests and pleasant summer homes for those with the means to own them, the Chautauqua Institution has been a place where thousands have come for entertainment, edification, and a dollop of moral upliftment since 1874. In contrast to many other summer cultural facilities such as Wolf Trap outside Washington, DC, Ravinia near Chicago, or Berkshire near Boston, Chautauqua’s core stock-in-trade has been talk, rather than music or dance.

Now, sadly, Chautauqua’s name will be linked to something very different. Rushdie’s assailant, Hadi Matar, was a resident of New Jersey, but reportedly has family ties to a southern Lebanese village where demonstrations of banners in support of Hezbollah are to be seen. (As yet, however, there has been no statement by the assailant or his lawyer regarding his intentions or motivations.)

Chautauqua — both the upstate New York town and the institution — has given rise to the use of that name as a synonym for a particular kind of a larger social phenomenon in public education. The New York venue has hosted many prominent figures in US history, including four sitting presidents — Ulysses S Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D Roosevelt and Bill Clinton — as well as Susan B Anthony, Sandra Day O’Connor and Mark Twain. In fact, Roosevelt went there several times, calling it “the most American thing in America”.

And the socialist labour organiser Frank Bohn said of it: “He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America.”

It began in 1874 when a then well-known philanthropist and a Methodist minister joined together to set up the Chautauqua Lake Sunday School Assembly, originally designed to train Sunday school teachers and church workers. Over time, the assembly grew beyond its religious origins to become today’s nonsectarian Chautauqua Institution. Right from its earliest days, it established the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) to give those unable to afford it, a tertiary education with a “college outlook”.

In fact, this circle was one of the world’s first efforts at what we now call remote learning. The four-year CLSC course was taught through mail correspondence and guided at-home reading. As the Washington Post explained: “It was intended to help people use their free time in a more rewarding way (instead of, say, gambling or drinking). Students in remote areas — often women and rural labourers — formed reading circles to stay motivated and split the cost of books, spreading the influence of Chautauqua beyond western New York. At the end of their study, they were invited to Chautauqua to receive certificates of completion.

“The success of CLSC led to what became known as the Chautauqua Movement, sparking ‘daughter chautauquas’ that sprung up in far-flung areas across the U.S. Eventually, the word chautauqua became a generic term to describe a range of educational events in rural areas. Travelling chautauquas began popping up around the turn of the century, also known as circuit chautauquas or tent chautauquas, with speakers and performers hired by talent agencies. According to some historians, the movement peaked around 1915, when 12,000 communities had hosted a chautauqua.”

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This mass educational movement faded by the 1920s with the rise in the greater mobility of the automobile culture, the growing influence of an evangelical Christianity that ran counter to the more freethinking style of the chautauquas, and increasing educational opportunities for women. The Great Depression then made fundraising and financing increasingly problematic for the Chautauqua Movement.

Nevertheless, several chautauquas continue to operate beyond the original venue. At that spot, nearly 150,000 visitors a year come for its nine-week, summer season of activities. The institution, said the Post, is guided by “four pillars — arts, education, religion and recreation — the organisation has its own theatre company, symphony, opera, ballet and visual arts centre, as well as classes, interfaith lectures, a rotating chaplain and outdoor recreation.

“Documentarian [filmmaker] Ken Burns has called the Institution an embodiment of the ‘pursuit of happiness.’ ‘Happiness with a capital “H” is about lifelong learning and the improvement of the brain, the heart, the body and the soul throughout one’s lifetime,’ he told the Chautauquan Daily. ‘And there is no place on Earth that embodies that rigour and that joy more than Chautauqua Institution.’”

As a result, in the year when attendance was no longer restricted by Covid-19 precautions, it would have been a natural fit for the celebrated (and controversial) author Salman Rushdie (the sometimes-hidden public figure, hidden because of a sentence of death put on him, a fatwa, issued by a now-deceased Iranian ayatollah over Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses) to be at this year’s Chautauqua summer season.

Rushdie has been a major figure in PEN International, among many other efforts, on behalf of freedom of expression. His presence at Chautauqua would be especially important and newsworthy on two fronts, given his first-hand experiences as a leading literary figure in the Indian diaspora — but also given the growing litany of assaults on freedom of expression around the globe that are supportive of the many varieties of authoritarianism and would-be authoritarians.

His appearance was set as a dialogue about the experiences of refugee writers in the US, but, even before it had begun, Matar rushed the stage and stabbed both the author and the session’s chair, Henry Reese, co-founder of City of Asylum, a nonprofit organisation that houses writers exiled from their countries for their controversial writing. As a result of the attack, at a minimum, Rushdie received wounds to his liver, his face (with the probable loss of an eye), and the nerves to one arm, before his attacker was subdued by audience members and a New York State Trooper in the audience.

Rushdie was quickly transported by helicopter to a major trauma centre for emergency surgery. Following the operations, Rushdie was put on a ventilator, but by Sunday his condition had stabilised sufficiently that the ventilator could be removed, allowing him to speak, according to his literary agent.

The attack has been strongly condemned by numerous political and literary figures around the world, including President Joe Biden.

Now living in the US, Rushdie had earlier been living in the UK where his life had been one of deliberate obscurity, complete with a security guard and a pseudonym — Joseph Anton, derived from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov — for his daily life and travel purposes while the fatwa was deemed to be in force. That edict had offered symbolic encouragement and the promise of a rather hefty reward to anyone who would do the deed.

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Lauded by readers and critics

The quality and imagery of Rushdie’s writing have been widely lauded by readers and critics alike, right from the appearance of his first novel, Midnight’s Children, playing off of the moment when British India was partitioned at midnight on 15 August 1947 into Pakistan and India.

As a child of a Muslim family but raised as an atheist, the contents of Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, had a deep-rootedness in Islamic lore and traditions, but precisely because of its obvious lack of reverence towards those traditions, values, and ideas, it was almost guaranteed to raise the hackles of Islamic religious figures in many places. The book was dutifully and quickly banned in a number of nations, including South Africa, shortly after it was published in Britain.

Despite the controversy, the book received major critical support as a significant work of imagination. As the late Palestinian-American critic Edward Said wrote in his essay Against the Orthodoxies: “It is not only a ‘case’, but a man and a book. Salman Rushdie has suffered unconsciously as a human being. In hiding for four years, he has lost his personal life and all personal tranquillity. Forced constantly to move, unable to be with family or friends, he has been a hunted man, ironically in full view of the world, for whom the dreadful Iranian fatwa — as vengefully obdurate as it has been stupidly murderous in intent — is an occasional item on the news. No person, no matter what the circumstances, should have to live that way.

“But we must also remember the book itself, The Satanic Verses. An epic of migration, instability, and volatility, it challenges all conceptions of fixed identity, with a wit and originality that appreciate in time. Why do readers find it hard to accept its energy? Because it overturns not just religious orthodoxies, but national and cultural ones as well. Were it the loathsome curse against Islam that it is portrayed as being, readers could set it aside and ignore it. It is attractive, engaging, funny…”

Given the times and events during the late 1980s and even beyond, the announcement of that fatwa was taken seriously by the author, his publisher and various Western nations. While this edict was theoretically rendered inoperative some years ago by statements emanating from Iranian sources, other religious legal interpretations say a fatwa cannot simply be rescinded by another theological authority after a prior leader had promulgated one. Accordingly, it is possible to speculate the assailant was inspired to attempt his attack on Rushdie because of that earlier pronouncement.

It did not take long for controversy over Rushdie’s new novel to spill over into South Africa’s own politically and culturally charged world of 1988. The Weekly Mail and the Congress of South African Writers’ Book Week of that year had planned to focus on freedom of expression — not a surprising choice, given the still-ongoing repression in the near-final winter of the apartheid regime. Rushdie was invited to deliver a keynote speech but that invitation quickly became the subject of strident protests by a variety of Muslim groups in South Africa.

Given the threats of violence towards the Book Week sponsors and the speaker, and the obvious and reasonable reluctance on the part of those sponsors to call upon the South African Police to help maintain order and security, Rushdie was effectively uninvited. At the time of his being disinvited, the Washington Post reported from South Africa: “Ironically, Rushdie’s first appearance here was scheduled to be at a panel discussion on censorship whose title, quoting 19th-century writer Heinrich Heine, is ‘Wherever they burn books they will also in the end burn people.’”

In the end, once Book Week moved to Johannesburg, an event was set up at the Market Theatre with a telephone link with Rushdie. As Anton Harber, then the editor of The Weekly Mail recollected for The Guardian some years later: “We had told other media that the event was off and had no newspaper of our own, so we could only spread it by word of mouth over two days. We were astounded when about 500 people crowded into the room to stare at a near-empty stage while Afrikaans writer Ampie Coetzee, sitting in a large armchair, conversed with an absent Rushdie, whose voice boomed through speakers and filled the room: ‘I’m very pleased to be with you, if only in this rather ghostly way.’ The atmosphere was magical: in the gloom of a state of emergency, in the horrors of the last few weeks, it was another small triumph against those trying to silence Rushdie and ourselves. We had no newspaper, but we were doing what we always tried to do: find imaginative ways to get around censorship, and share those ideas most challenging to authority.”

An exploration of the conflicting interpretations of the implications of Rushdie’s would-have-been presence as well as a theoretical critique of The Satanic Verses and its critics came in Paul Trewhela’s 1989 article. In the end, the conflict divided the South African literary world and the roles of such luminaries as Fatima Meer, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee. In light of the attack on Rushdie the other day, reverberations from that attack have again become a heated topic among South Africans on social media forums.

Ultimately, though, it should not matter whether one likes the contents of Rushdie’s writing — or if one takes pleasure in espousing the right of readers to consume his words. Perhaps most especially, now, this is true when we see his (or any other writer’s) words as threatening to a particular social, political, religious, or economic orthodoxy. Rather, in these troubling times, and in the midst of conflicts in various parts of the world, freedom of expression, along with the parallel efforts of journalists doing their reporting, keep coming under attack. It is imperative to protect such freedoms. A writer, any writer, must not be the subject of an unbalanced zealot’s physical attack, but, sadly, this is the world we now inhabit. Readers should do what this writer plans to do this week, and what Henry Reese urged on international television: buy some of Rushdie’s writing as a tangible symbol of support for his right to write. DM

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