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The Satanic Video
(New York Times) Bill Keller - Salman Rushdie's new memoir recounts a decade under a clerical death sentence for the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was dropped in 1998 and Rushdie is out of hiding, but he is still careful. Rushdie will tell you that the stormy Arab Summer is not about religion. When the founding zealot of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued his Rushdie death warrant in 1989, the imam was not defending the faith; he was trying to regenerate enthusiasm for his regime, sapped by eight years of unsuccessful war with Iraq. Likewise, Muslim clerics in London saw the fatwa against a British Indian novelist as an opportunity to arouse British Muslims, who until that point were largely unstirred by sectarian politics. "This case was a way for the mosque to assert a kind of primacy over the community. I think something similar is going on now," said Rushdie. It's pretty clear that the protests against that inane video were not spontaneous. Anti-secular and anti-American zealots, beginning with a Cairo TV personality whose station is financed by Saudi fundamentalists, seized on the video as a way to mobilize pressure on the start-up governments in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. Rushdie notes that there are characteristics of Islamic culture that make it tinder for the inciters: an emphasis on honor and shame, and in recent decades a paranoiac sense of the world conspiring against them. "You define yourself by what offends you. You define yourself by what outrages you." In his new book, Rushdie recounts being urged by the British authorities who were protecting him to "lower the temperature" by issuing a statement that could be taken for an apology. He does so. It fills him almost immediately with regret, and the attacks on him are unabated. He "had taken the weak position and was therefore treated as a weakling," he writes.