The attack on Israel shocked him, says Salman Rushdie in daily topics-Interview. It is the beginning of a downward spiral. The writer had previously been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
Salman Rushdie has been fighting for freedom of expression for years. Even after death threats and a violent attack against him, the British-Indian writer continues to stand up against fanaticism and hatred.
Allowing other opinions to be “difficult but necessary,” he said in an interview with the daily topics. “If you only support opinions that agree with your own or that you don’t care about, then you’re not really supporting freedom of speech.” Democracy allows many different voices – that’s what distinguishes it from authoritarian regimes.
The Hamas attack on Israel came as a shock to him, Rushdie said. That cannot be expressed in words. “That was the beginning of a downward spiral.” We now really have to worry about how many innocent people will die, said the 76-year-old.
Even if Israel itself speaks of a long process, he hopes that the war will end soon. “Innocents are dying and one can only hope that this death will be contained. To do this, it must be stopped as quickly as possible.”
Knife attack in August 2022
In August 2022, Rushdie narrowly survived a knife attack against him. Since then he has been blind in one eye. The Iranian regime called for his murder in the late 1980s because of his novel “The Satanic Verses” – the fatwa has overshadowed his life ever since. None of this will stop him from continuing to write, Rushdie explained. “It’s been hard the whole time. Last August was an extra blow. I tried to respond to it the best way I know how: to write about it.”
He sees the task of an author – especially in these times – as being to describe truthfully what is happening, to try to understand it and to help others understand it. Above all, it is important to stand up for the values that good literature always stands for, said Rushdie. “High on that list is peace.”
“Respond to hate with love”
And that was also the topic at the award ceremony for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, which Rushdie was awarded at midday. At the ceremony in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, he said in his acceptance speech that he would be overjoyed if the jury could do “magical, even fantastic things” and that the reward would be “peace itself, the prize.”
With a view to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, Rushdie said that people were gathered in St. Paul’s Church “to talk about peace, when there is a war raging not far away, a war caused by the tyranny of one man and his greed for power and conquest War”. This is “a sad narrative that is not unknown to the German audience.”
A bitter conflict has also “exploded” in Israel and the Gaza Strip, said Rushdie: “Peace seems to me at the moment like a fantasy sprung from the smoke of an opium pipe.”
“We live in a time that I never thought I would have to experience,” the writer continued. “A time in which freedom – especially freedom of expression, without which the world of books would not exist – is under attack on all sides by reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, half-educated, narcissistic and careless voices.”
He called for people to continue to “counter bad speech with better speech.” To do this, you have to counter false narratives with better ones and respond to hate with love, says Rushdie.