Peace Prize to Salman Rushdie: A Sign of Freedom to Write

2023-06-19 14:24:43

opinion award

Also the courage to think and write what you want is peace

As of: 2:24 p.m. | Reading time: 3 minutes

Lives with the marks of the assassination: Salman Rushdie

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Salman Rushdie receives this year’s Peace Prize. The decision in favor of the writer, who is undeterred by Islamist assassins, recognizes one of the most important prerequisites for literature: inner freedom.

Salman Rushdie recently announced that he wanted to write a book about the assassination attempt on him. Now, just on his 76th birthday, it has become known that the writer will receive this year’s Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. A double signal, not only for Rushdie himself, but also for all of us: the prerequisites for the freedom of literature, and with it the peace to say and write what one thinks, are constantly under threat. Societies, and especially liberal ones, do well to occasionally commemorate this fact with symbolic acknowledgments.

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Indexed, ostracized, burned

On August 12, 2022, writer Rushdie was stabbed and critically injured at an event in upstate New York. There was worldwide sympathy for the Briton, who has lived in Mumbai (India) in 1947 and has lived in New York for many years, and who has not led a normal life since 1989. Because an Islamic fatwa declared Rushdie outlawed after the publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses” for alleged blasphemy, released for murder by any devout Muslim. The assassination attempt on Rushdie after 33 years showed how much such propaganda narratives have an impact and can blindly motivate even the most unliterary individual perpetrators.

It cannot be reminded often enough that writers do nothing other than shape worlds with words, tell magical stories with the joy of storytelling, imagination, and in the case of Rushdies also mockery and wit. The fact that Rushdie, despite all the circumstances – he lived under police protection and in hiding for decades – simply continued to write, apparently free of grief, resentment and bitterness, is not a matter of course.

The freedom to keep writing

The award decision underscores the need for writers to maintain inner courage in order to be able to write. Since the 1989 fatwa, Rushdie has lived in constant danger. “Nevertheless, he is still one of the most passionate advocates of freedom of thought and language – not just his own, but also that of people whose views he does not share.” This attitude is “an essential prerequisite for peaceful coexistence “, emphasized the Board of Trustees in its justification. In a first reaction, Rushdie was grateful and honored.

The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, endowed with 25,000 euros, has global appeal. The award has been presented every October in the Paulskirche since 1950. It forms the conclusion of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest industry gathering of its kind. It is not yet known who will hold the laudatory speech for Rushdie. In the course of its history, the Peace Prize has proven that “peace” can have very different facets. Economic, ecological, memory policy, civil society. Last year the prize went to the Ukrainian writer Serhij Zhadan. The Rushdies award stands for the importance of personal values ​​such as tolerance and forbearance, as well as confidence in maintaining personal freedom to write under the most adverse conditions.