Is there widespread support in the Islamic world for violence against Rushdie

Submitted by Prashant (United States), Aug 15, 2022 at 19:16

Dear Dr Pipes,
Computer algorithms can sometimes lead us toward the truth. If you want to know whether there is widespread support in the Islamic world for the attack on Salman Rushdie by a Muslim criminal, you can do an experiment: perform an Internet search to find out if your favorite prominent Muslim said anything about the attack. You would expect that prominent Muslims will openly speak and disapprove the violence against Rushdie.

I spent some time searching who said what about the recent attack on Rushdie. I could not find even one news story where any of the following Muslims (or Islamic apologists) expressed their disapproval about the attack. The people in this list were selected based on my memory and some unrelated Internet searches. For example, I learned about Ali Cyrus Ehsassi when I searched 'Muslim politicians in Canada'. 'Mehmet Oz' appeared in the list from my memory.

Aziz Ansari, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Barak Obama, Keith Ellison, Dave Chapelle, Hasan Minhaj, Arslan Iftikhar (all from the USA), Maleeha Lodhi, Imran Khan, Nawaz Sharif (Pakistan), Owaisi, Hamid Ansari, Amir Khan, Shahrukh Khan (India), Mahmoud Abbas, Iman Khatib-Yasin (Israel), Rupa Asha Haq, Yasmin Qureishi, Sayeeda Warsi (UK), Rachida Dati (France), Ali Cyrus Ehsassi, Ahmed Hussen (Canada), Mehmet Oz, Erdogan (Turkey)

We would expect that these prominent Muslims will speak against the attack on Rushdie forcefully and their statements would make enough news to be picked by the search engines. No such luck. I was not able to find even one definitive statement criticizing the attack.

The only two prominent Muslims whose criticism of the attack I could confirm were Fareed Zakaria (USA) and Javed Akhtar (India).

This experiment indicates (but does not confirm) that significant disapproval of attack in Rushdie might be absent in the Islamic world. As they always say, more investigation is needed.

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