Monthly Flanor

Gretchen Head is a professor of Arabic literature and will discuss Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in relation to Khomeini, the fatwa, and the possibility of questioning Islam in literary texts.

On February 14, 1989, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the death of British author Salman Rushdie and his publishers following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). As a result, his Japanese translator was murdered, his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher barely survived attempts on their lives, and Rushdie himself lived in hiding under police protection for ten years.

This lecture will, with a careful analysis of the novel and the broader literary context, explore how Iran, through the condemnation of Rushdie's novel and the resulting global crisis, effectively repositioned the boundaries of literary kufr (disbelief or blasphemy) in the Islamic world. This has radically changed the boundaries of freedom of expression and literary discourse, from the Middle East/North Africa to South and Southeast Asia.

This lecture will be in English.