Not a comics-related tale (although there is a tinge of fantasy in some of his books) but given the number of times the Iranian authorities crop up for condemning a cartoon, comic or film for insulting the nation and/or Islam it seems relevant – Salman Rushdie was awarded a knighthood in the Queen’s birthday honours recently and Iran is – shockingly – considering it an insult. Yes, I know, hard to believe since they are normally the most easy-going blokes who embrace the diversity of international culture and arts.
Apparently adding the honorific ‘Sir’ before Salman Rushdie is an enormous insult to all Islam because of the author’s famous (or infamous depending on your viewpoint) novel The Satanic Verses which the Ayatollah Khomeini, in a fair and considered move, condemned without actually bothering to read, issuing a fatwa which called for the truly religious to murder one of the world’s most respected authors (I seem to recall Trudeau took the mickey out of the events in Doonesbury with a strip which treated the Iranian religious leaders as an international book critics circle passing judgement on literary works). Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini claimed that “Giving a medal to someone who is among the most detested figures in the Islamic community is… a blatant example of the anti-Islamism of senior British officials“. Quite how insulting burning books and demanding the murder of a writer is to most civilised people is, strangely, not addressed by the Iranian government; such a shame their leaders take such a stance on other cultures when their land is one of the original cradles of the first human civilisations.
Mon, Jun 18, 2007
Awards, Books