Pencils are being sharpened on both sides of the Atlantic as a tiff between the Times Literary Supplement and Salman Rushdie reaches full swing. The author of The Satanic Verses has threatened to ‘get medieval’ with the literary magazine after it ran an article criticising his response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
Following the attacks in Paris, the New York based author released a statement. ‘Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms,’ he wrote. ‘This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.’
Rather praise Rushdie’s words, Michael Cains, a staff writer for TLS, took exception to his use of the word ‘medieval’ and accused the author of ‘intellectual complacency’.
‘”We,” whoever that is, all know what the Middle Ages were like, don’t “we”? They were nasty, brutish, and went on for ages. Anything after the Romans and before the Renaissance is the bad old Middle, right? You could call it “medieval”; everything smelled bad, minds and bodies were in a permanent state of plague, and the only known form of entertainment was killing, in all its most disgusting forms,’ he wrote. ‘If you believe all this, and don’t believe in the existence of cathedrals and Chaucer, congratulations – to borrow the words of Joseph Brodsky, “you’re in The Empire, friend” – the empire of intellectual complacency.’
Rushdie subsequently took to Twitter to warn the TLS of the fate that awaits the author if he persists.
Hey, @TheTLS, you keep this pedantic shit up and I’m a get medieval on yo’ ass. http://t.co/234yf9ugNa @lawrencewarner @LDArcens @lucycmunro
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) January 24, 2015
.@lawrencewarner @LDArcens @lucycmunro dictionary: medieval, adj. (also mediaeval) • informal, derogatory: very old-fashioned or primitive. — Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) January 24, 2015
TLS staff are yet to respond.
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