Burning books a short step from burning authors — or stabbing them.
Many column inches have been expended this week on the second and inevitable part of the Salman Rushdie Affair. Despite Iran officially rescinding its support for the fatwa imposed on the author by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the blasphemy — which writer Kenan Malik noted in 2019 was “undeniably critical and insulting” — remains.
Burning books in protest is as old as books themselves. Next stop: burning them as policy. Take Captain Beatty, the fire chief in novelist Ray Bradbury’s , a novel whose main character, Guy Montag, is a disillusioned fireman whose job is not to put out fires but to start them — with books. Bradbury’s novel, partly inspired by Nazi book burnings, was banned in apartheid SA as well as by Florida’s Bay County school board for its “vulgarity”, so he knew a thing or two about intolerance.
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