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Salman Rushdie: No 'Safe Space' When Defending Free Speech

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

A group of Emory University students recently made news by demanding protection from being put "in pain," as one student chant put it, by slogans like "Accept the Inevitable: Trump 2016" chalked overnight on campus walkways.

In pain? They could just wait for rain to wash their troubles away.

That's what Salman Rushdie, a writer who knows a thing or three about being threatened for his ideas, said when I asked him about the Emory uprising.

Yes, that Salman Rushdie. The Booker Prize-winning, Muslim-raised British Indian novelist and essayist has been living under threats to his life since Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for his assassination.

Khomeini did not like the way the Prophet Muhammad is depicted in "The Satanic Verses," Rushdie's 1988 novel. After the Ayatollah's death, the fatwa was continued and a bounty for Rushdie's death raised by other Muslim fanatics.

Yet, after years of living in a cocoon of government security in Great Britain, he left government bodyguards behind and moved in 2000 to what may be the best place on earth to hide in plain sight: Manhattan.

 

Coincidentally he also taught for several years at Emory, which he likes well enough to place his archives in the university's library.

Yet when I caught up with him in Washington, he expressed dismay and disappointment with the "silly" dust-up over chalked Trump slogans. There are no "safe spaces" against offensive ideas, he said, nor should we want there to be -- especially in places that are intended to expose us to the world, not to hide from it.

"I assure you," he said, "most Emory students are actually quite intelligent."

Appropriately, Rushdie was in town to talk at New York University's Washington, D.C., center about "whether art should or must be politically correct." (Full disclosure: My wife, Lisa Page, director of creative writing at George Washington University, led the onstage discussion.) He cheerfully dismissed that question with a "no" and asked for the next question.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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