In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie went into hiding. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the writer without delay, for which the assassin would receive a bounty of $1 million.
Rushdie’s offense was writing a novel. Called the Satanic Verses, the story depicted the prophet Muhammad (and his wives) in ways that incensed parts of the Muslim community and turned the author into the world’s most infamous heretic. As the story circulated through international media, Western intellectuals often offered muddled responses.
Of course it was wrong for Khomeini to call for the murder of a novelist who had merely written a book, most agreed. But few liberal-minded commentators seemed eager to say Rushdie was entirely without fault. The Indian-born writer had, after all, deeply offended the religious beliefs of millions of Muslims, in nations where values like piety and respect for authority had long been deemed more important than free expression.
The controversy highlighted the longstanding philosophical chasm between the Islamic and Western worlds: fundamentalism versus liberalism. But for the journalist and author Jonathan Rauch, the most revealing part of the Rushdie affair was not the cultural clash of values. It was the failure of Western critics to understand the nature of their own liberal intellectual system.