Threats against Salman Rushdie are “no match” for the author’s “will to write, speak, and rise to the defence of other targeted writers”, PEN America has said, in the wake of the $600,000 (£430,000) bounty raised by Iranian media outlets to reinforce the longstanding fatwa to kill the novelist, adding to the existing $2.8m already offered.
The Iranian state-run Fars news agency reported last week that 40 state-run media outlets had raised the money to re-energise the death fatwa originally placed on Rushdie in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Iran’s deputy culture minister Seyed Abbas Salehi told Fars that “Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out”.
But PEN America’s executive director Suzanne Nossel said that while there are periodic attempts “to draw new attention to the threats against Rushdie by those who want to capitalise on old passions to win new political gains”, the threats have not cowed him or his work.
In a joint statement issued by PEN America, PEN International and English PEN, the free speech organisations “deplore[d] the effort at intimidation” from the Iranian media outlets, saying: “The spectre of a new financial reward being added to this longstanding threat [from Khomeini] is a craven attempt to fan the flames of religious extremism and hatred”.
PEN added that in spite of the threat under which Rushdie has lived for the last 27 years, his “outspokenness and passionate defence of imperilled writers the world over stands as an inspiration, providing a daily reminder of what is at stake in safeguarding free thought”.
PEN called on western governments who are currently expanding their relations with Tehran “to insist that the Iranian government nullify its threat and bounty, disavow the fatwa once and for all, and uphold its international obligations to protect free expression”.
The statement follows a letter signed by over 100 writers, academics and activists, including Richard Dawkins and Tom Holland, saying that “democratic and secular governments should unequivocally condemn the regime’s fatwa and bounty, demand their immediate cancellation, prioritise human rights and free expression, and side with freethinkers rather than appeasing a theocratic regime”.