When Islamic fundamentalism declared war on the West

This force should have been confronted when it first reared its ugly head on English soil, in the burning streets of Bolton and Blackburn.

Due to the horrific death toll laid before the world on the 11th September 2001, and the sequence of events that were sparked by the jihadists that took down the twin towers, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the universal encroachment of the cyber security apparatus at home, the common-man is forgiven for thinking that this era of history began in lower Manhattan.

But it did not. The birth of fundamentalist Islamic terror striking the Western world in theocratic rage began decades earlier and thousands of miles away from New York’s financial district.

It did not even begin in Tehran, for reasons I will touch on later, but what happened in Iran was certainly the watermark of this frightening ordeal.

In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revolutionary leader of Iran, ignited an explosion so loud and destructive that it scorched the Western world in a cross-continental carpet-bomb tactic engineered to target one man.

That man’s name is Salman Rushdie. Already an accomplished author before he found himself the persona non grata of the Muslim world, he clinched the Booker Prize in 1981 for his novel Midnight’s Children, a tale documenting India’s rough journey to independence following British colonial rule.

But the moment he posed with his trophy for the cameras was to be the quietest moment of his career – the calm before the storm. In 1988, Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, a work of fiction where one of the characters Mahound is directly inspired by the life and teachings of Muhammed.

Long story short, parts of the Islamic world finds it ‘blasphemous’ (the horror) and begins demanding that the book be burned along with its author, through various degrees of intimidation.

Unsurprisingly, due to both his country of permanent residence and his ancestral lineage, the first call to arms was sounded by Muslims in Britain and India, Rushdie’s birthplace. By the end of 1988, waves upon waves of frustrated Islamists contacted the publisher, Viking Penguins, to demand that the book be stripped from the shelves for upsetting their intolerant, theocratic leanings.

In Bradford and Bolton, book burnings of the Satanic verses were planned by the local community and carried out in the streets by thousands of enthusiastic participants, with journalist Robert Winder reminding the world how it harkened back to the dark days of Nazi Germany. By 1990, spurred on by the publication of the U.S. edition, a shopping list of nations had banned the book.

Then the Ayatollah played his hand. With a soup of theological and political opportunistic motives swirling through his mind, Khomeini ordered the murder of Rushdie and all those engaged in the publishing of the book. The threat was heeded, and followed through.

In 1991, the novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death on home soil, while the book’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard was lucky to escape with his life following an attempted assassination in 1993.

Meanwhile Rushdie himself is forced to live under police protection 24/7, and is forced to re-locate fifty-six times in a single year (a new home a week). Meanwhile the Ayatollah continued to sit comfortably in his palace and await to dish out his $3 million bounty to the lucky assassin until his death in June 1989.

Khomeini’s death did not mean the end of the fatwa, nor the acceptance by Islamic fundamentalism towards the distribution of The Satanic Verses or the right to offend in general. Hence why Rushdie’s name is now draped over the news cycle.

Rushdie leapt over the Atlantic Ocean to try to live a normal life in the U.S., with as little police protection as possible. Curiously enough, the venue where he was stabbed fifteen times in the upper body by an Iranian ultra-nationalist (despite said fanatic being raised in New Jersey) has been criticised for being a little too light on the bodyguard front. This gap in the frontlines permitted a radical fundamentalist to almost make a successful attempt on Rushdie’s life nearly twenty-five years after the fatwa was issued.

The Iranian state has not let go of its hatred for the author either. A newspaper headline reads ‘the Devil has been blinded’ above a caricature of Rushdie, whose frail, white hair is brushed upwards to give the impression of a pair of horns.

What has befallen Rushdie and has continued to hang like a noose over his neck for all these years is a force of pure evil. It should have been confronted when it first reared its ugly head on English soil, in the burning streets of Bolton and Blackburn.

Islamic fundamentalism never gave up in cutting short Rushdie’s life, nor has it stood by and let non-Muslims poke fun at Muhammed without violent retaliation - often lethally so. Twelve dead Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, a decapitated French teacher, and a suspended British grammar schoolteacher are a testament to this continued assault on our sacred liberties by an outside, imperialist, and thuggish foe.

The West must get serious about the foe it is fighting, or the fate of Rushdie will be feared by all of us unwilling to bow to this theocratic tyranny.