Author: AFP
Publication: The Times of India
Date: October 3, 2002
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/articleshow?artid=24080037
British author Salman Rushdie has
defended a best- selling French writer, Michel Houellebecq, who is being
taken to court on charges of racial insult and inciting religious hatred
for having called Islam "the dumbest religion".
In an opinion piece published Thursday
in the French newspaper Liberation and Wednesday in the US daily The Washington
Post, Rushdie -- who himself was made the target of an Iranian fatwa for
supposedly blaspheming Islam in his 1988 book The Satanic Verses -- said
a guilty verdict for Houellebecq would be a blow to free speech.
The British author did not support
Houellebecq's comments about Islam and said he had hesitated in coming
forward on the Frenchman's behalf because "just about every writer who
comes into conflict with the thin-skinned guardians of Islamic sanctities
is forced to wear the 'new Rushdie' cap" and they might "rightly resent
having the darkest chapter of my story superimposed upon their own difficulties."
Rushdie said the charges against
Houellebcq were "ridiculously slight" and opined that "if an individual
in a free society no longer has the right to say openly that he prefers
one book to another, then that society no longer has the right to call
itself free."
The main mosques in Paris and Lyon
are behind the lawsuit against Houellebecq, 43. They started proceedings
in February after reading the writer's remarks in the literary magazine
Lire, which is also cited as a defendant.
A Paris court is to hand down its
judgement on October 22.
