The democratization of blasphemy
Salman Rushdie delivers the 2025 William Phillips Lecture
In March, Salman Rushdie visited The New School to deliver the 2025 William Phillips Lecture: “Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime.” Rushdie’s remarks, which traversed free speech, torture, and fashionable piety, are not to be missed. Read the text now at Public Seminar.
Blasphemy Is a Victimless Crime
Salman Rushdie
The reason for the title of this talk is that in the difficult period of my life after the attack on The Satanic Verses began, a reader who I didn’t know, who was clearly a fan, sent me in the mail a T-shirt, and on the front of the T-shirt it said, “Blasphemy is a victimless crime.” And I guess what he meant is that where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy. Because if there is no God, there’s nobody to blaspheme against, which is a point of view that I had a lot of sympathy with.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a writer about religion. Religion, unfortunately, had a different idea. Another thing it was wrong about. I grew up in a household in what was then called Bombay, in India, which was very largely secularized. And I think one of the reasons for that is that my parents’ generation had gone through the very tough moment of the independence and partition of India and Pakistan, a time in which a very large number of people were massacred, Hindus by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus, a very bloody birth. And it’s impossible even to know how many people [died]—the official figures say something like a million, but the real figures might well be two million or more people. And I think what happened to my father and mother—who were from a Muslim background, but they didn’t want to go to Pakistan, they felt more Indian than Muslim—I think after that, after this very bloody birth, they didn’t really want much to do with religion. The extent to which there was religion in my family is that my mother didn’t believe in eating anything that came from a pig. No pigs. That was Islam for us.
When I went to boarding school in England, I decided to rebel, and I went to the school shop, and I bought a ham sandwich. This is a very important ham sandwich. It wasn’t very good, but it felt extraordinary to eat it at the age of 13 and a half, to eat the forbidden flesh of the swine. And nothing happened. There was no thunderbolt, and I understood at that point that God did not exist. This was the lesson of the ham sandwich. Also, I think when I was at college in the mid-sixties, religion really wasn’t a subject. I mean, I was 21 in 1968, I was 20 in the Summer of Love. There were other things on our minds. And of course, it was also a very political moment. It was the moment of the protests against the Vietnam War. It was the moment of feminism; it was the moment of the Civil Rights Movement. There was a lot that we had to argue about and talk about. What we didn’t talk about was religion. That seemed to be marginal to the conversation. And one of the great surprises of my life is the way in which it has moved back into the center of the conversation.
Not only Islam. Christianity in this country and Hinduism in India have all become, to a large extent, politicized—and needing to be reckoned with. And blasphemy has always been the technique that religion has used to exert control over what is possible to say and what is possible to think. I’m doing something regarding Voltaire, and so I’ve been reading him and the Enlightenment writers. Voltaire, of course, was a serious enemy of the Church and believed the Church rather than the state to be the greatest oppressor of thought. His famous phrase is ecrasez l’infâme—crush the infamous thing—the infamous thing being the Catholic Church.
The Enlightenment writers basically did believe that the enemy was the Church, not the state. And in order to create the thing that we came to understand as freedom of speech, it was necessary to break the power of the Church over what could be said, not the power of the state. The writer François Rabelais, who was attacked by the Church, was defended by the state, and he was defended on the basis of his genius. So anyway, out of that Enlightenment period, observed and absorbed by Thomas Paine, came the American idea of liberty and freedom. So it all comes from an intellectual desire to break the power of other forces to limit thought. And the tool used for this was blasphemy. Rather interestingly, a few years ago I went to a literary festival in Cartagena, in Colombia. Apart from being a beautiful old city, Cartagena was also one of the great centers of the slave trade and a place in which the Spanish Inquisition was very powerful. And to this day in Cartagena, there is now a museum of the Inquisition, which, if you go and see it, is eerie because it contains instruments of torture: scaffolds, racks, thumbscrews. There they all are with little signs telling you what they were for. And I was shown this by one of the executives of the museum, who told me how important they were. He was kind of pro-torture. He said it was really important that these methods existed in order to keep the Church successful and established. It is maybe the only museum in the world which is in favor of the torture of people, as was the Catholic Church for a long time. So blasphemy has been used in that way and is still used in that way in certain parts of the world.
I’ll just talk for a little bit about my own experience. I was living in England at the time of the fuss about The Satanic Verses. Earlier than that, the last successful prosecution for blasphemy in the United Kingdom was in 1976. In a magazine called Gay News, the poet James Kirkup wrote a poem about the crucifixion of Christ, imagining a gay centurion at the foot of the cross, fantasizing about the body of Christ. Quite powerful and not at all restrained, this poem. And it was attacked. There was a campaigner in England called Mary Whitehouse who used to campaign against what she considered to be moral evils, especially anything involving sex, and she was given permission to bring a private prosecution against Gay News for its publication of this poem. And they were found guilty. The verdict was reversed later, but it was the last time in England in British law that the crime of blasphemy was found to have been committed.
When the attack on The Satanic Verses began, the people attacking the book in the UK used the Kirkus case to say that I should be prosecuted and found guilty in the same way. And the only reason that I was not found guilty, given that the law was still on the statute book, is that the law only protected the Church of England. Kind of unfair, right? Which is what they pointed out. But the solution to the problem was not to extend the law, which is what was being asked for, but to diminish the law. It took a few years doing, but eventually in the UK, the law of blasphemy was abolished and has remained so. And many countries of the world no longer have such a law.
But there is the thing coming back into fashion, which is blasphemy creeping in through a back door, which is now it’s supposed to be wrong to upset people. If somebody feels upset, they have the right to try and prevent you from saying what you want to say, which is actually exactly the same as the kind of democratization of blasphemy. Anybody can be the pope.
And I recommend to anybody out there, young people who might think that offendedness is a virtue: Don’t be the pope. We’ve got one, and that’s enough.