Thursday May 7th | Gretchen Head
On May 7th, Gretchen Head is giving a lecture at Flanor and Siduri. Gretchen Head is a professor of Arabic literature and will tell us about Saman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in relation to Khomeini, the Fatwa, and the general possibility of questioning Islam in the literary text.
On February 14, 1989, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the death of the British author Salman Rushdi and his publishers following the release of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). As a result, his Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher narrowly survived attempts on their lives, and Rushdie himself lived in hiding under police protection for a decade.
Through a close reading of the novel and its greater literary context, this lecture will consider how Iran, through its condemnation of Rushdie’s novel and the global crisis it catalysed, effectively shifted the borders of literary kufr (unbelief or blasphemy) in the Islamic world, radically changing both the boundaries of free speech and literary discourse from the Middle East/North Africa to South and Southeast Asia.
