Quote of the Day: Salman Rushdie

In 1989 the Iranian regime put a contract on Salman Rushdie’s head because  he wrote a book. In 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to with freedom of speech as a prominent demand. Progress, perhaps.

Two years after Ayotollah Khomeini of Iran declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses the author made a surprise appearance at Columbia University at a forum on the First Amendment.

Maybe he was ahead of the curve.

“Sometimes I think that, on day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the “Rushdie affair” as imporbably as the west now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that — as the European Enlightenment demonstrated — freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy…

‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

– From Rushdie’s speech “What is My Single Life Worth?”