As Salman Rushdie prepares to visit Ireland in March, a look at an Irishman’s involvement in the Satanic Verses controversy.

31 YEARS AGO, in February 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa – a religious edict- calling for the murder of the Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie.

That year, Newry native Kevin Boyle, a veteran of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and a prominent human rights lawyer, was serving as the first director of Article 19, a new London-based NGO promoting freedom of expression and information.

31 years ago this month, that role placed Boyle in the perilous front lines of the emerging clash between Islamic extremism and western liberal democracy.

Like many conservative Muslims around the world, Khomeini was infuriated by the alleged portrayal of the prophet Mohammed in Rushdie’s new book, The Satanic Verses, although neither he nor most other critics had actually read the novel.

As the fatwa was endorsed by a host of Islamic fundamentalist organisations with a long involvement in terrorism, British authorities rushed the writer into hiding, from which he would not emerge for nearly a decade.

In its passions and bloodshed, the Rushdie affair was a foretaste of the mistrust, tension and conflict that have come to characterise so much of the West’s subsequent dealings with the Islamic world.

Climate of fear

Rushdie’s Japanese and Italian translators were killed; his Norwegian publisher was shot three times but survived. Liberal imams in Brussels were murdered. Bombs went off in bookstores in central London. Among writers, publishers, booksellers and academics, there was an unprecedented climate of fear.

Nonetheless, just six days after the Ayatollah’s declaration, Kevin Boyle organised an emergency meeting at the headquarters of the National Union of Journalists in London.

In addition to members of Article 19, those in attendance included representatives from the NUJ, Index on Censorship, the international writers’ organisation PEN, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain and the Publishers’ Association.

Denouncing the fatwa as “armed censorship”, they decided to form the International Committee for the Defence of Salman Rushdie and his publishers. Boyle agreed to serve as chair.

A few days later, Boyle, along with the head of Article 19’s board William Shawcross, influential British playwright Harold Pinter (who in 2005 would win the Nobel Prize for Literature), Pinter’s wife, the historian Lady Antonia Fraser, and a few others, gathered in an ornate meeting room at the House of Commons.

They agreed to draft a letter in support of Rushdie and to seek the signatures of as many writers and intellectuals as possible before publishing it.

‘It was crucial that the writing community, the literary world, should rally to Rushdie’s defence,’ recalled Aryeh Neier, the co-founder of Human Rights Watch. ‘Had that not happened, the impact of the fatwa and the physical attacks on people who were associated with Rushdie’s book would have had a far more devastating impact.’

Boyle took the lead in drafting the letter, which very much reflected his values and sensitivities.

“On 14 February,” it began, “the Ayatollah Khomeini called on all Muslims to seek out and execute Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, and those involved in its publication worldwide. We, the undersigned, insofar as we defend the right to freedom of opinion and expression as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declare that we are also involved in the publication.”

The next sentence acknowledged the strength of feeling against Rushdie. “We appreciate the distress the book has aroused.”

Such language was typical of Boyle, who, because of his experience in Northern Ireland, was committed to religious tolerance and wanted to accommodate the fact that there were intensely held beliefs on the other side.

The same attitude informed the letter’s central appeal – a call for “world opinion to support the right of all people to express their ideas and beliefs and to discuss them with their critics on the basis of mutual tolerance, free from censorship, intimidation, and violence.”

Within 10 days, Boyle’s letter had a thousand signatures, including five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Seven others who signed would subsequently be awarded the prize, among them Pinter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Mario Vargas Llosa and the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.

Other notables included Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, Elie Wiesel, VS Pritchett and John Hersey. Significantly, a half-dozen exiled Iranian writers signed, as did authors from Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. It was a striking rebuff to the argument that freedom of expression was a purely western notion.

On 2 March 1989 the letter was published in 62 newspapers and magazines around the world. Four months later, the document had been signed by over 12,000 writers from 67 countries.

Potential target

The letter made Article 19 a voice for Rushdie, who remained in hiding. Boyle became the public face of the campaign – and thus a potential target.

“That took a hell of a lot of courage,” Boyle’s old friend Bert Lockwood, editor of Human Rights Quarterly, observed. “He was quite visible.” Threats were received at the Article 19 office, and the organisation briefly considered asking for police protection.

That was 31 years ago. Sadly, the religious and political fault lines exposed by the Rushdie affair have only become more acute. But Kevin Boyle, who felt that freedom of expression was a universal value underpinning all the other freedoms he spent his life defending, believed the fatwa was a threat that had to be resisted, whatever the personal risks.

“There are times in all our lives when you would wish it was otherwise,” he later wrote, “but you take up the challenge.” As the world struggles today to respond to terrorism and authoritarian governments in a way that preserve fundamental values like the right to freedom of expression, those words still resonate.

Mike Chinoy was a long-time foreign correspondent for CNN, He is currently a Hong Kong–based Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the University of Southern California’s US-China Institute. His biography of Kevin Boyle, Are You With Me? Kevin Boyle and the Rise of the Human Rights Movement, will be published by Lilliput Press in March.