How the 34-Year-Old Fatwa Against Salman Rushdie Marks the Timelessness of the Islamist War Against the West
11th September 2023
The Investigative Project on Terrorism.
“You have the watches, but we have the time,” is a phrase by the Taliban referencing the twenty-year war in Afghanistan. It also underscores the American challenge in fighting the ideological war. That challenge is a short scope, a limited range distance through which we measure either progress or failure. Meanwhile, the enemy is patient and always planning. While generational wars fueled by ideology are difficult concepts for most people to sit with, there is one man who is a symbol of the ideological war against Islamist extremism: Salman Rushdie.
Of the many narratives that surface about Islamic extremism, the one that most captures public attention is the controversy around Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses. Any creative work on Islam, like The Satanic Verses, will struggle to be understood given that Islam itself often isn’t understood even by followers of the faith. Absent that, Islam is a belief system vulnerable to a mercurial nature of politics and culture that flanks the faith — a characteristic that is ironically also fast defining the American sociopolitical landscape.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.