FREEDOM WATCH : Satanic Threat

Few novels may be said to have made history. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was one. Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” is another. A novel in which a main character dreams himself into the mind of Mohammed (the title alludes to the scandalous but historical deletion of a few verses from the Koran), “The Satanic Verses” became an international scandal in the Muslim world and prompted a still-unlifted death sentence against the author by the Iranian government.

From the standpoint of the West, the death sentence was an ominous globalization of Iranian censorship, and that threat remains: To date Iranian hit men have attacked three translators of “The Satanic Verses.” But the larger historic importance of “The Satanic Verses” lies in the intellectual space that it has opened within world Islam. This is what recently prompted a group of Arab Muslim intellectuals to publish, in France and in French, a collection of essays bravely in defense of Rushdie.

We welcome the news of this collection, and we applaud the internationalist vision and courage of George Braziller, the distinguished and indomitably independent U.S. publisher who will publish it in translation as “For Rushdie: One Hundred Arab Muslim Intellectuals for Freedom of Expression.”

There were, unsurprisingly, no American takers when translation rights to this collection were offered at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Braziller--publisher, years ago, of Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Words”--stepped into the breach. Bravo, Braziller.