Skyrocket your IELTS speaking band score by 1-2 points in under a month with real-time AI conversations!
Practice dictation & shadowing on the daily life story: Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (2)
Salman Rushdie: ‘Life Under Threat’ (2)
0 / 34
Total Correct Answers:
0
/ 34
(1)
Salman Rushdie.
(2)
Life under threat
(3)
out there, where you are in the rich and powerful and lucky West.
(4)
Has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it?
(5)
The original metaphor has reasserted itself.
(6)
I'm back in the balloon, asking for the right to live.
(7)
What is my single life worth?
(8)
Despair.
(9)
Whispers in my ear.
(10)
Not a lot, but I refuse to give in to despair.
(11)
I refuse to give in to despair because I've been shown love as well as hatred.
(12)
I know that many people do care and are appalled by the crazy upside down logic of the post fatwa world in which a single novelist can be accused of having savaged or mugged a whole community, becoming its tormentor instead of its tarred and feathered victim and the scapegoat.
(13)
For all its discontents, many people do ask.
(14)
For example, when a white pop star turned Islamic fanatic speaks approvingly about killing an Indian immigrant, how does the Indian immigrant end up being called the racist?
(15)
Or again, what minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?
(16)
I refuse to give in to despair, even though for 1000 days and more I've been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness.
(17)
My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood and finding soon enough their echoes on the English streets.
(18)
I could not understand the force that makes parents hang murderous slogans around their children's necks.
(19)
I have learned to understand it.
(20)
It burns books and effigies and thinks itself holy.
(21)
But at first, as I watched the marchers, I felt them trampling on my heart.
(22)
Once again, however, I have been saved by instances of Fair mindedness of goodness.
(23)
Every time I learned that a reader somewhere has been touched by The Satanic Verses, moved and entertained and stimulated by it, it arouses deep feelings in me.
(24)
And there are more and more such readers nowadays.
(25)
My post bag tells me readers, including Muslims, who are willing to give my burned, spurned child a fair hearing at long last.
(26)
Sometimes I think that one day Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times will find the Rushdie affairs improbable, as the West now finds martyr burning.
(27)
One day they may agree that, as the European Enlightenment demonstrated, freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy.
(28)
Maybe they'll agree to that.
(29)
The row over The Satanic Verses was at the bottom of an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the story of Islam.
(30)
And that power must belong equally to everyone.
(31)
That even if my novel were incompetent, it's attempt to retell the story would still be important.
(32)
That if I failed, others must succeed.
(33)
Because those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change.
(34)
Truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.