Je Suis Charlie

It is important, today especially, to remember that this is nothing new. We have been here before. On the 11th of July, 1991, Hitoshi Igarachi was murdered in his office at the University of Tsukuba. His crime? He had translated The Satanic Verses into Japanese. That was all. Eight days previously Ettore Capriola, the novel’s Italian translator, had been fortunate to survive an attempted assassination in Milan. And in October 1993 William Nygaard, the Norweigan publisher of Salman Rushdie’s novel, was shot three times. Mercifully and remarkably, he survived.

In fact, it had begun before that. On Valentine’s Day 1989 when the Iranian Ayatollah issued his fatwa against Rushdie. That was a test too many people failed back then. We have learned a lot since then but in many ways we have also learned nothing at all.

In 2012, Rushdie wondered if any publisher would have the courage to endorse The Satanic Verses if it were written then. To ask the question was to sense the depressing answer.