How the Salman Rushdie Fatwa Changed the World

Mr. Rushdie’s recondite book was an odd choice for such ire. Islamic scholars and jurists had long debated Surah 53, the segment of the Quran on which “The Satanic Verses” is based. It concerns Muhammad’s efforts to convert the powerful pagans of Mecca to Islam. The canonical interpretation held that the devil intruded into the prophet’s inspirations, producing what appeared to be a temporary and tactically astute toleration of paganism. Possibly excepting the slaughter of the male members of the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe, no action has caused more heartburn among Islamic commentators.

Mr. Rushdie built his provocative fantasy on well-trodden ground. Unfortunately for him, his Muslim background, coupled with Khomeini’s need for a new cause after Iran’s defeat a year earlier in its war with Iraq, catapulted the author into a tumultuous intra-Muslim struggle. If John Wansbrough—author of a 1977 book arguing that the Quran couldn’t have been the work of one man in the early seventh century—had written Mr. Rushdie’s book, neither Khomeini nor the clerics in Britain and India who first expressed their dismay about his writing would have cared. The same is true of Wansbrough’s students

Michael Cook

and

Patricia Crone,

who suggested that early Islam might have been a Jewish messianic movement.

In 1989 Iran’s supreme leader divided the world into three parts—the West and East, both led by infidels, and the Muslim-led but Western-harassed Third World. Infidels are by definition misguided and prone to ignorant, invidious ideas. Muslims historically didn’t concern themselves with European aspersions on the faith or its prophet. Even after the Europeans started to defeat Ottoman and Mughal armies, Muslims remained mostly self-assured and oblivious to Christian criticism. But that changed as Muslim elites began to Westernize. For many faithful Muslims, Mr. Rushdie, an Indian Muslim by birth, was the quintessential example of this new, thoroughly secularized global elite. He was hopelessly fallen and had committed a capital offense.

The ayatollah, who had an acute sensitivity to the zealous importation of Western ways into his homeland, tapped into a deep vein of Muslim pride and anger with his fatwa. It became a significant eruption of what the historian

Bernard Lewis

described as “the revolt of Islam.” And it revealed a crippling weakness of secularized Muslims in most Muslim societies—namely, that they had a devilish and dangerous time gainsaying traditional beliefs even when they believed them to be absurd, harsh or antiquated.

The Westernizing, sometimes liberal evolution of Muslim societies has always been an ebb-and-flow affair. Khomeini’s edict against Mr. Rushdie reduced the running room for Westernized elites, including Muslim rulers and dissidents. Profane intellectual exploration and civilizational self-criticism—elemental parts of the West’s not-so-secret sauce—became much more dangerous in the post-1989 Muslim world. Completely Westernized artists who bathe in provocation, such as Mr. Rushdie, were made more vulnerable.

Khomeini’s success against Mr. Rushdie, which nearly cost the author his life on Aug. 12 in Chautauqua, N.Y., induced an increasingly paralyzing concern among Westerners about invidious inquiry. Fear and guilt about Europe’s imperial sins and America’s Cold War heavy-handedness—which contributed to tier-mondisme (Third Worldism) in France and multiculturalism in the U.S.—made it difficult to have honest conversations about the West and Islam. Today, it’s hard to imagine a young Wansbrough, Cook or Crone getting tenure at a prestigious university.

Mr. Rushdie had been living with little to no security for nearly 20 years, even though radical Islam, at least on the Sunni side, wasn’t yet a spent force in the West’s large immigrant communities.

Hadi Matar,

the Lebanese-American Shiite who stabbed Mr. Rushdie, might have had contact with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the muscle behind Iran’s theocracy. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the guards abet such a hit. They have plotted in recent weeks against former U.S. officials and dissident Iranians abroad, including

John Bolton

and

Masih Alinejad.

Mr. Rushdie, now an American and easily the West’s pre-eminent tribune for free speech, deserves a vigorous defense. How we extol and protect him, and punish those who have harmed him, reverberates far beyond our shores.

Mr. Gerecht, a former Iranian-targets officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.