Western literary leftists defended Iran only after the Rushdie fatwa
Evidence
The Iranian Revolution was perhaps the last great event to offer any considerable lease on life for a full flowering of cultural nationalism in the journals of the metropolitan Left, so that literary theory itself felt compelled to defend Islam against its misrepresentations in the American media even as Khomeini consigned the Iranian Left to the dungeons. It took a principally literary event – the macabre sentencing of Salman Rushdie for selling certain novelizations of Islam to British and American corporate publishing – for protest campaigns against Khomeini to envelop that very literary intelligentsia which had never bothered when that same clerical state had not only sentenced but tortured and actually killed countless communists and other patriots. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 58
Categorization
- SHARE: Worth sending to anyone following intellectual left politics or postcolonial theory — the asymmetry between moral outrage over Rushdie and silence over executed Iranian communists is a striking detail.
- QUESTION: Worth tracing the actual timeline of metropolitan Left responses to Iran’s clerical regime before the fatwa.
- XREF: connects to: The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 150
Related
- The Rushdie affair exposed metropolitan Left cultural nationalism as selective about its martyrs (similarity 0.90)
- Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation (similarity 0.79)
- Said’s post-Orientalism rage made the solitary Western-city writer the sole redeemer figure (similarity 0.78)