2022.08.12 萨尔曼-拉什迪写了一本书

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都是因为萨尔曼-拉什迪写了一本书
正如人们看到一本书被烧毁就会感到恐惧一样，作家的鲜血也会引起人们的反感。

作者：加尔-贝克曼
在1988年的一张黑白照片中，萨尔曼-拉什迪（Salman Rushdie）留着下巴长的黑发，在白衬衫和裤子外面穿着深色背心，盘腿坐在地板上。
1988年，英国伦敦，《撒旦诗篇》一书的作者萨尔曼-拉什迪盘腿坐在家中的地板上。(Horst Tappe / Getty; The Atlantic)
2022年8月12日



萨尔曼-拉什迪被悬赏33年了。他是一个一直生活在因自己的文字而被杀害的恐惧中的作家。无论人们对拉什迪和他作为小说家的技巧或他的公众形象有什么其他看法，有一点是真实的：他了解被作为目标和被憎恨--被烧成肖像--被迫躲藏，甚至在最近几年，继续看不起自己意味着什么。所有这些都是因为他写了一本书。

因此，拉什迪今天上午在纽约Chautauqua所有地方的舞台上遭到袭击，这让人感到震惊，但也许并不意外。他当时正准备在肖托夸研究所向听众发表演讲，这个山寨社区成立于19世纪末，是一个宗教学习的场所，此后每年夏天都成为教育和讨论的绿洲。正是在这里，拉什迪被人用刀反复击打，这是一个可怕的讽刺。


我们仍然不知道袭击者的动机，只知道目击者对事情发生的速度感到震惊，并对袭击者被迅速拘留表示感谢。当然，人们马上会想，这种暴力行为是否是由某人实施的，他打算履行1989年在对他的小说《撒旦诗篇》作出愤怒反应后发出的法特瓦--一个从未真正撤销的呼吁，或者这个人是否对他们的行为有其他扭曲的解释。但我们知道结果。据《纽约时报》报道，截至今天晚上，拉什迪仍在接受手术。不管暴力事件发生的原因是什么，有一个信息是明确的，正是因为目标是一个作家。自由表达是值得被判处死刑的。这一点就把我们推到了危险的领域，因为现在它是已经发生的事情；曾经被认为是最坏情况的事情现在已经成为现实--可能再次发生。

阅读：事后看来，反恐战争是从萨尔曼-拉什迪开始的。

也许最令人震惊的直接反应来自美国笔会："我们想不出在美国领土上对文学作家进行公开暴力攻击的类似事件。" 这也是事实。还有哪些社会给了我们被谋杀的作家？斯大林的苏联是我脑海中印象最深的一个。奥西普-曼德尔斯塔姆在战俘营中死去。艾萨克-巴贝尔被处决。独裁者下令在卢比扬卡监狱的地下室射杀的意第绪诗人和作家。当然，拉什迪并没有成为他自己国家的目标--在伦敦隐居多年后，他在过去二十年里一直公开在纽约生活。同样，我们仍然不知道为什么他被挑出来遭受这种暴行。但是，正如人们看到一本书被烧毁就会退缩一样，一个作家的鲜血被泼洒也会引起人们的反感。


拉什迪本人已经成为言论自由方面的绝对主义者。2015年在埃默里大学的一次演讲中，他说："限制言论自由不仅是审查制度，而且是对人性的攻击。" 他拒绝了相对主义的观念，即 "言论自由在文化上是特定的"，某些文化可以简单地 "保留拒绝它的权利"。对他来说，对任何事情说出自己想法的权利是普遍的，他警告说，伴随着它不再被认为是这样的事实的危险。在某些方面，他从未停止过与围绕法特瓦首次点燃的辩论的斗争，一些人毫无保留地为他辩护，另一些人则认为，也许他认为的对伊斯兰教的侮辱是一个错误，是他无谓的挑衅。

今天早上的暴力事件打断了这场辩论，使其沉默--暴力往往就是这样。作家代表了我们文化中通过思想与人类接触的部分，他们的激情通过句子、段落和页面来表达。这是一个我们不仅应该保护而且应该捍卫的领域。愿它永远不会被挥舞着刀子的手臂的蛮力所侵蚀。我们都应该希望拉什迪活下来。这不仅仅是因为一个作家不应该为他所写的东西付出生命。而是因为我们需要他不断提醒我们可能发生的最糟糕的事情--可能发生在一个只用文字的人身上的暴力。

加尔-贝克曼是《大西洋》杂志的高级编辑。他最近的作品是《安静的之前》。论激进思想的意外起源》。




All Because Salman Rushdie Wrote a Book
Just as the mind recoils at the sight of a single book burned, the spilled blood of an author inspires revulsion.

By Gal Beckerman
In a black-and-white image from 1988, Salman Rushdie, with chin-length dark hair and wearing a dark vest over white shirt and pants, sits crossed-legged on the floor.
Salman Rushdie, author of the book 'The Satanic Verses,' sits cross-legged on the floor of his home, London, United Kingdom, 1988. (Horst Tappe / Getty; The Atlantic)
AUGUST 12, 2022
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Salman Rushdie has had a price on his head for 33 years. He is a writer who has lived with the fear of being killed for his words. Whatever other opinion one might have about Rushdie and his skills as a novelist or his public persona, this much is true: He has understood what it means to be targeted and hated—burned in effigy—forced to hide and, even in recent years, to continue to look over his shoulder. All because he wrote a book.

And so it came as a shock, but maybe not as a surprise, that Rushdie was attacked this morning onstage, in Chautauqua, New York, of all places. He was about to speak to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a cottage community that was founded in the late 19th century as a place for religious learning, and that has since become an oasis of education and discussion every summer. That it was here that Rushdie was struck repeatedly with a knife is a terrible irony.


We still don’t know the attacker’s motive, just that eyewitnesses were startled by how fast it happened and grateful for how quickly the attacker was detained. Of course one immediately wonders whether this act of violence was carried out by someone who intended to fulfill the fatwa issued in 1989 after furious reaction to his novel Satanic Verses—a call never truly rescinded—or whether this person had some other twisted explanation for their actions. But we know the results. Rushdie was still in surgery as of this evening, The New York Times reported. And regardless of why the violence took place, one message was unambiguous precisely because the target was a writer: Free expression is worthy of a death sentence. This alone pushes us into dangerous territory, because now it is something that has happened; something once considered a worst-case scenario is now an actuality—one that could happen again.

Read: In hindsight, the war on terror began with Salman Rushdie

Maybe the most jolting immediate reaction was from PEN America: “We can think of no comparable incident of a public violent attack on a literary writer on American soil.” And it’s true: What other societies have given us murdered authors? Stalin’s Soviet Union is the one that comes quickest to my mind. Osip Mandelstam dying in a prison camp. Isaac Babel executed. The Yiddish poets and writers whom the dictator ordered shot in the basement of the Lubyanka prison. Rushdie has not been targeted by his own state, of course—after living in hiding for years in London, he has lived openly in New York for the past two decades. Again, we still don’t know why he was singled out for this brutality. But just as the mind recoils at the sight of a single book burned, the spilled blood of an author inspires revulsion.


Rushdie himself has become something of an absolutist on the freedom of expression. In a speech at Emory University in 2015, he said that “limiting freedom of expression is not just censorship, it’s an assault on human nature.” He rejected the relativistic notion that “freedom of expression is culturally specific” and that certain cultures can simply “reserve the right to reject it.” To him, the right to speak your mind, about anything, is universal, and he warns of the danger that accompanies the fact that it has ceased to be considered as such. In some ways, he never stopped fighting the debate that first ignited around the fatwa, with some defending him unreservedly and others arguing that perhaps his perceived insult of Islam was a mistake and a needless provocation on his part.

This morning’s violence cuts through this debate, silences it—as violence often does. Writers represent the part of our culture that engages with humanity through ideas, whose passion is expressed through sentences and paragraphs and pages. It’s a realm we should not just preserve but defend. May it never be eroded by the brute force of an arm wielding a knife. We should all hope that Rushdie survives. And not just because a writer should never have to give his life for what he has written. But because we need him to keep reminding us of the worst of what can happen—the violence that can happen—to someone who has used nothing more than his words.

Gal Beckerman is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is the author, most recently, of The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas.
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