Rushdie remains alive, but at the cost of a good portion of his life. The effect of the fatwa has been chilling. The day after the riot in Kashmir, India, the Ayotolla Khomeini of Iran issued the fatwa against Rushdie and the book’s publisher, Viking Penguin, sentencing author and publishers to death and calling upon “all zealous Muslims to execute them quickly,” an action later made more attractive by the promise of more than $1 million for the assassination of Rushdie. Demonstrations in India and Pakistan on successive days turned into riots, with deaths in both countries. Demands that its publisher cease publication were accompanied by demonstrations in Bradford, England, where the book was burned, and in Hyde Park, London. Censorship efforts raged in the first weeks of 1989. In the meantime the book had been awarded the Whitbread prize as the best novel published in England. India banned it a week after its publication, South Africa in two months. Some of these have been collected or recapitulated. The account that follows of reaction to The Satan Verses has been reconstructed from a variety of news and magazine articles heard and read over a period of several years in the United States and England. The Satanic Verses was published on September 26, 1988, but its controversial reputation preceded it. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize, England’s most prestigious literary award, given to the best noble published in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the Commonwealth countries. Born in India and raised in a Muslim but nonreligious household, Rushdie was schooled in and later migrated to England. Perhaps the most familiar and the most dramatic case of censorship in our lifetimes has been that of The Satanic Verses, a novel by Salman Rushdie. Nevertheless heresy-hunting silences the very voices that we most need to hear, and censorship is illogical, harmful, and futile. This may seem a strange position in a world where there are so many challenges to faith and belief, so many things we do not wish to see and read. Stephen is the one accused of heresy, but the accusation commands the whole class to silence. Accusation is a powerful form of censorship both seek in the interest of the institution to silence any voice that might threaten or undermine its power to make and enforce rules, and by stifling the one dissident voice to smother all under a heavy blanket of conformity.
![heretic burger heretic burger](https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/o05Rcfs1TbRGIBZfXrSaLg/348s.jpg)
Accusation they understand, or possibly they find it attractive, so that to be accused of heresy is to be marked different, subject to persecution, exile, even death. Furthermore, institutional absolution does not leave the accused with a clean slate since the accusation works more powerfully than its withdrawal upon his or her peers, who may understand the terms of acquittal no better than they do the delicate distinction between acceptable and unacceptable belief behind the charge of heresy in the first place. An institution defines the terms of orthodoxy, its representatives examine expressions of adherents, announcing “heresy” when they find a breach in language, behavior, or concept, and the unfortunate accused heretic has the choice (sometimes) between recantation and persecution. Stephen’s experience is not unlike that of the accused heretic in any arena at any time in history. Later, away from the classroom, they persecute him verbally, and physically attack him (Joyce 327-28). His recantation, however, is not so effectual with Stephen’s classmates.
![heretic burger heretic burger](https://www.kget.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/HeresyBurger.jpg)
![heretic burger heretic burger](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-5MRciUcAoGjpq.jpg)
On one such day as he waits, head down in hope and fear, he hears the master stop at his desk, hears the dread announcement: ‘“This fellow has heresy in his essay.”’ Stephen asks the nature of his heresy, and the master points to a sentence that errs slightly in defining the relationship of the human soul with God, and Stephen replaces a phrase – “approach nearer” – with one word-“reach.” The master is satisfied Stephen has submitted – or, to use a word more familiar in collocation with heresy, he has recanted. The schoolboy Stephen Dedalus, the artist-in-embryo of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, looks forward eagerly and anxiously to Tuesdays, when the master returns the essays and declares one superior.