Where Salman Rushdie defied those who would silence him, today too many fear causing offence | Kenan Malik

The terrible injuries suffered by the great British writer will not extinguish his belief in the critical importance of saying the unsayable

A poet's work," one of the characters in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses observes, is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict," the narrator adds, then they will nourish him."

As Rushdie lies, terribly injured, on a ventilator in a Pennsylvania hospital, there seems something appallingly prescient about the novel, the rage against which has spilled rivers of blood. Including, now, Rushdie's own.

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