Terrorism The New Satans

By William E. Smith

The story thus far: British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, 41, is in hiding somewhere in England. He lives under a death threat imposed by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who charges that Rushdie's new novel, The Satanic Verses, is blasphemous and an insult to Islam. For good measure, Iranians have offered a bounty of as much as $5.2 million to Rushdie's executioner. The world is stunned by the notion that the Iranian leader would issue a death threat against a British subject who has merely written a work of phantasmagoric fiction that, to be sure, occasionally deals with Islam in a fanciful and irreverent way.

A few days later, one of Khomeini's colleagues, President Ali Khamenei, declares that the death sentence might be rescinded if only Rushdie would repent. Rushdie duly issues a formal apology, saying he meant no insult to true believers. Will Khomeini forgive him? Will the death sentence be lifted?

Absolutely not. The Ayatullah is made of sterner stuff than that. The very next day the Iranian revolutionary leader, 88, issued a statement rejecting Rushdie's apology and declaring flatly, "It is incumbent on every Muslim to do everything possible to send him to hell." Three days later, in a speech to a group of Iranian clerics, Khomeini added that nothing, not even Western economic sanctions, would "force us to retreat and forgo implementation of God's decree."

In the first days after the Ayatullah's shocking death threat, governments and the general public alike in the U.S. and Western Europe were slow to react. Who could believe that a book that practically nobody had read -- and an often obscure if sometimes brilliant one, at that -- was the catalyst precipitating a bizarre international crisis?

But as Khomeini repeated his threat again and again, Western governments at last began to take action. Led by Britain and strongly supported by West Germany, the twelve members of the European Community voted to withdraw their top-ranking diplomats from Tehran in protest. So did Canada, Sweden and Norway. Iran swiftly retaliated by pulling most of its own ambassadors out of Western Europe.

Some Americans found the Bush Administration surprisingly slow and reserved in its response. But at midweek the President finally stepped up to the White House lectern and criticized Khomeini's death sentence as "deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior." Bush warned that Washington would hold Iran accountable for "any actions against U.S interests." While it was the strongest statement thus far from anyone in the Government, there was little more that the Administration could do. The U.S. had no diplomatic pawns to move, nor had it ever ended the trade embargo imposed on Iran in 1979. In fact, the Bush Administration seemed to be acting with considerable restraint, perhaps to protect the nine American hostages still in the hands of fanatic Muslims linked to Iran. Much of the week's most vocal outrage came from writers and publishers, who belatedly rallied to Rushdie's defense. Not a word was heard from Moscow.

For the West, the issue largely seemed to resolve itself into a question of free speech. But in Iran, a vastly different phenomenon was taking shape: the Ayatullah had seized upon Rushdie's book as a flaming spear with which to halt his country's creeping trend toward moderation. Within days, the "liberals" who had seemed to be in the ascendant in Tehran dropped from sight. They had been trying to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties with the West in order to rebuild the country following its disastrous eight-year war with Iraq.

The most astonishing ideological pirouette was performed by President Khamenei, who had seemingly tried to defuse the crisis a few days earlier when he spoke of Rushdie's possible repentance. But Khamenei sounded almost as fierce as the Ayatullah last week, saying of the death edict, "The long black arrow has been slung and is now traveling toward its target. There is nothing more that can be done." Western governments, he added, had made the mistake of confusing "freedom of expression with the freedom to insult 1 billion Muslims."

The most significant aspect of the Ayatullah's "send him to hell" speech was his emphasis on the rifts within his own government and his fears about the influence of those he called "misled liberals." Said Khomeini: "We should not, for the sake of pleasing several sellout liberals, act in a way that gives the impression that the Islamic Republic of Iran is deviating from its principled positions." Suddenly Rushdie's purported blasphemy seemed minor compared with the sins of Iranian officials who had dared support a renewal of ties with the decadent West.

Even worse in Khomeini's eyes was the fact that the liberals had spoken cravenly against some of the clerical regime's previous policies, including its obstinate prosecution of a war that cost Iran an estimated 350,000 lives. In case anyone doubted his aims, Khomeini told the clerics, "As long as I am here, I will not let the government fall into the hands of the liberals. As long as I am alive, I will never stop cutting off the hands of agents of the U.S. and the Soviet Union."

Who were these unnamed liberals in addition to Khamenei? One was certainly parliamentary Speaker Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has hinted that Iran should have ended the war in 1982, after driving the invading Iraqis out of its territory. Within days, he too chimed in with an attack on the West. "We know what our duty is regarding those who are a partner in cursing the Prophet," declared Rafsanjani. "The ground has been laid for a vast battle between Islam on the one hand, and paganism and arrogance on the other." But he tried to forestall stronger reprisals from Europe in case anything should happen to Rushdie. "If any Muslim carried out his duty," said Rafsanjani, "this cannot have any link with the Islamic Republic of Iran."

Another target was Khomeini's designated successor, Ayatullah Ali Montazeri, 64, who recently acknowledged that Iran's revolutionary leaders erred in isolating their country from the rest of the world. Khomeini was deeply offended by such talk. Dismissing the views of those who regard "martyrdom and self-sacrifice" as "worthless," he declared last week, "I formally apologize to the ((families)) of the martyred . . . and ask God to accept me next to the martyrs of the imposed war." He added, "We are not for a moment sorry for our actions during the war."

Tehran radio reported that the Iranian parliament fully supported Khomeini's policy of "keeping aloof from the Great Satan," the U.S., and "cutting relations with colonialist Britain." One of the Tehran regime's leading hard- liners, Premier Hussein Mousavi, accused the West of "cultural conspiracy" and declared that "Iran's firm decisions on the ((Rushdie)) issue will ensure the country's independence and dignity." Small wonder that the best-known pragmatists had run for cover.

Muslim anger surfaced elsewhere, fueling American and British fears for the safety of their hostages. In Lebanon, two related pro-Iranian Shi'ite organizations, Hizballah and Islamic Jihad for the Liberation of Palestine, both believed to be holding Western hostages, endorsed Khomeini's threat. Islamic Jihad issued a vow to seek revenge against "all those who take part in strong and ferocious campaigns against Islam." The statement was accompanied by a Polaroid photograph of the three American hostages, Alann Steen, Robert Polhill and Jesse Turner, who were kidnaped from the campus of Beirut University College more than two years ago. But the communique made no new threats against their lives. In Bombay, 10,000 anti-Rushdie protesters rampaged through the streets until police moved in. When the rioters would not disperse, the police opened fire, killing 13 and injuring more than 70.

Compared with the uproar in Iran and the Indian subcontinent, most of the Muslim reaction in the Middle East was mild. Though a conference of theologians meeting in Mecca denounced Rushdie as a "heretic and renegade" and reportedly demanded he be tried in absentia in an Islamic country, others argued that the case had been blown out of proportion. Hassan Saab, an adviser to the Sunni Muslim Grand Mufti of Lebanon, called Rushdie "an insignificant writer who has attacked a great prophet." He asked, "What harm has befallen the Prophet?" In Egypt the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Mosque, Sheik Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq, noted that the net effect of the furor had been to increase the book's sales and profits "by astronomical figures." It would be far better, he suggested, if Islamic scholars prepared their own book refuting Rushdie's "lies." The English-language Egyptian Gazette argued that the Ayatullah's pronouncements "will do more to damage the image of Islam in the West than any words of Mr. Rushdie." Concluded the paper: "Without the outcry, the book might have sold some tens of thousands of copies and then sunk into oblivion as being too obscure for the general interest."

Instead, it has become a best seller. In the U.S. the book's first printing of 50,000 copies was sold out; a second printing of 100,000 was due in a few days, but stores reported orders of 200,000 or more.

Whatever the literary or theological merits of The Satanic Verses, its commercial success is assured; yet for almost a week, such leading chains as Waldenbooks, B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble kept their remaining copies off the shelves. In New York City the Authors Guild, the PEN American Center and the Writers Guild of America (East) fired off letters of protest to the bookstore chains, criticizing them for caving in to censorship by terrorism.

On Wednesday some 200 members of the National Writers Union demonstrated in front of the Iranian mission to the United Nations. And in New York City's SoHo district, 21 American writers, including Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, met to exchange brave words and read passages from the Rushdie novel. Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, received the loudest response when he said, "Until the threat of murder by contract is lifted, all authors should declare themselves as coconspirators. It is time for all of us to don the yellow star and end the hateful isolation of our colleague." In a grander flight of moral outrage, Mailer told the crowd, "Khomeini has offered us the opportunity to regain our frail religion, which happens to be faith in the power of words and our willingness to suffer for them."

On a lighter note, Mailer said he suspected the odds against a customer suffering harm while browsing at a bookstore were close to 100,000 to 1. "Such odds, if widely promulgated," he observed, "would have brought in many prospective customers looking for the spice of a very small risk." ; Biographer Robert Massie, president of the 6,500-member Authors Guild, offered a practical suggestion: he urged writers to ask publishers to withdraw their books from chains that had removed the Rushdie novel from their shelves.

Once again the bookstore chains bent with the wind. They had suffered a direct hit earlier in the week when New York Times columnist William Safire rebuked them: "Even for ever-merging Big Publishing, below the bottom line is another line marked 'freedom.' " At midweek B. Dalton, which also owns the Barnes & Noble stores, announced that "at the urging of an overwhelming majority of its store managers and employees," it would again stock the Rushdie novel. Waldenbooks said it would stick to its policy of selling the book but not displaying it, though local managers were permitted to put it on the shelves if they chose to. For the moment, the talk was theoretical, since the book was sold out in the U.S.

As for Rushdie, he remained in hiding. With him was his American wife, novelist Marianne Wiggins, who canceled her U.S. book tour to promote her new novel, John Dollar.

Rushdie's friends worried aloud about how he could make a life for himself under the Ayatullah's threat of death. Would he hire guards, or remain in seclusion, or retreat to some distant land? Few held out any hope that Khomeini would simply change his mind because the real victims of the Rushdie affair were not only the hapless author and his wife but the 50 million citizens of revolutionary Iran. After a decade of terror and death, the country had seemed to be in the early stages of recovery. But by his actions last week Khomeini brought that healing process to a halt.

With reporting by Helen Gibson/London, David S. Jackson/Cairo and Priscilla Painton/New York