For about 10 years – when I was between the ages of about six and sixteen – I lived with my family in Saudi Arabia. The American school I attended there did not go past the ninth grade, and so at the start of tenth grade I made my way to a boarding school in Connecticut. In the fall of my senior year, Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses was published in London. Shortly thereafter, Iran’s supreme leader the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the book and placed a bounty on Rushdie’s head. Demonstrators in both South Asia and Britain denounced the novel as blasphemous. Even critics who had no particular investment in the charge of blasphemy distanced themselves from Rushdie as a purveyor of allegedly “Islamophobic” tropes.
When the book appeared in the United States (in February 1989) I promptly bought a copy and decided to carry it with me home for spring break reading in Saudi Arabia. My mother accompanied me on that trip home, and as we waited to pass through customs I divulged to her that I harbored a copy of the illicit text in my backpack. She panicked. Customs inspections in Saudi Arabia were overseen by the kingdom’s religious police. My mother took my copy of the book, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and promptly disposed of it in the women’s restroom. We then passed through customs without incident. I haven’t seen the book since, though over the years I acquired two more copies (including a first edition).
As someone of Arab-Muslim background, I felt ambivalent about Rushdie’s text even without reading it. The charge that it trafficked in anti-Muslim prejudice troubled me. It would continue to trouble me over the many years of America’s disastrous wars in the Middle East (which are ongoing as I write these words).
But the mistake I made as I waited to pass through customs in Jeddah that spring day was not one of ambivalence. It was, rather, that I took free expression for granted. I assumed that I could simply pass through a carefully policed international boundary with my American habits and ways of thinking unhindered. In Knife, his moving account of having barely survived an assassin’s blade at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York in August 2022, Rushdie writes that “the first lesson of free expression [is] that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free.”
The ambivalence about free expression that some – many? – on our campus feel today is an ambivalence that I too have known. I felt it during our protracted debates over DEI and the Carlson lecture affair in 2021 and 2022. And I have felt it throughout the even more acrimonious campus conflict over Israel and Palestine of 2023 and 2024. But if the only thing you see when you look out the window of your MIT office these days is antisemitism, then you are not looking hard or far enough. One of the most right-wing, racist governments in Israel’s history has systematically used anti-antisemitism to legitimate its horrific infliction of suffering on the people of Gaza. Anti-antisemitism has also become one of the principal vectors of the American rightwing assault on higher education. The Biden administration has enabled both developments, first by providing unconditional material support for Israel’s war on Gaza, and second by failing to take a stand in favor of institutional academic freedom and free expression.
As the incoming presidential administration prepares to help us focus our vision on the problem of antisemitism in American higher education, we are all very soon going to have to begin looking harder and further. There is no way around the coming battles. We must fight these battles wisely and compassionately, with due concern for the diversity of our community in all its forms. But silence will probably not be a viable option. And too many of us have been silent about the longstanding injustice of America’s and Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. If the best thing one can say about these policies is that they do not (yet) quite amount to genocide, something has gone awfully wrong. For fear of the consequences of what we say, many of us are, on this issue at least, not free.
My Academe essay explains why I believe MIT and other American universities must ensure a wide berth for students and faculty to contest these policies notwithstanding our ambivalence over free expression. I thank the FNL editors for their interest in reprinting the essay here.
