In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 2: Larry David's Finest Hour

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
in a scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm [S9/E3]

In the long-awaited ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry incurs a death sentence from the Supreme Leader of Iran after satirizing the Ayatollah on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in promotion of his latest project - a musical comedy called Fatwa! - based on The Satanic Verses controversy in which a similar religious ruling was passed against the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1989 [see part one of this post]. 

This, I think, is a brave thing to do - arguably far more daring than his usual schtick of breaching social conventions and examining the micropolitics of every day life in obsessive detail. Brave too, I might add, of HBO to agree to this; for these days there aren't many producers willing to be involved in a project that might offend the religious sensibilities of Islam (they might claim their reticence is a sign of respect, but I think we all know it's a sign of fear).      

Post-The Satanic Verses controversy, post-the murder of Theo van Gogh, post-the Danish cartoon crisis, and post-the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the West has learned to appease Islam and limit its own right to freedom of expression. In other words, fear of deadly reprisals has succeeded in bringing about cultural self-censorship. So again, hats off to Larry David!

And hats off too to Salman Rushdie for not only agreeing to make fun of what was, for many years, a truly horrible situation, but also to take part in an episode of the show, where - to brilliant comic effect - he instructs Larry on all the advantages of living under a fatwa (including fatwa sex, which, according to Rushdie, is the best sex there is). 

As one commentator on this episode pointed out, the reason such jokes constitute one of the most effective weapons against Islamic fundamentalism is precisely because - as Khomeini once said - there's nothing funny about Islam.

The ninth season of Curb met with mixed reviews and audience figures were, I believe, much lower than for season 8. Critics said the world had moved on in the six years between the two seasons and that the show belonged to another time.

Maybe that's true: but, ultimately, what matters is the fact that Larry David, in collaboration with Rushdie, demonstrated how best to respond to those fanatics who would have us all submit to their religious mania: with courage and with humour.      


Click here to watch a scene with Larry David and Salman Rushdie (the self-styled Fatwa Boys) from 'A Disturbance in the Kitchen', episode 3 / season 9 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, dir. Jeff Schaffer (HBO, 2017). 

In Praise of the Fatwa Boys 1: Remembering the Rushdie Affair

The Fatwa Boys: Salman Rushdie and Larry David 
Image credit: John P. Johnson / HBO

On Valentine's Day, 1989, when the rest of us were sending flowers to loved ones, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran - Ayatollah Khomeini - decided to issue a fatwa against the British writer Salman Rushdie: a religious decree that urged Muslims around the world to kill the author (and publishers) of The Satanic Verses (1988); for it was a novel that was said to offend the sacred values of Islam.   

This grey-bearded cleric, aged 89, and with only months left to live, added that any good Muslim who was killed trying to carry out the death sentence should be considered a martyr, i.e., one whose place in paradise was guaranteed. Just in case that wasn't a strong enough motivating factor, a $2.8 million bounty was also placed on Rushdie's head.    

The writer was immediately granted police protection by the British government, though many seemed to resent the fact (and the cost to the public purse). Rushdie then spent many years moving between safe houses and living a life in which everyday activities - like kicking a football in the park with his son - became either impossible or subject to tight security measures.

Many Muslim countries around the world banned the import and sale of the book and encouraged violent protests against the West. In Bradford, a mob publicly burned copies of the work and echoed the call for Rushdie's execution. Whilst some authors, including Susan Sontag and Tom Wolfe were vocal in their support, others - who shall remain nameless - were noticeably silent on the issue (some even implied that Rushdie got what he deserved for insulting a great religion).   

It was only in the 1990s that Rushdie was able to gradually recover something approaching a normal life once more, eventually moving to New York. But the threat to his life remained; Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, stated in 2005 that as Rushdie was still an apostate his killing was authorised within Islam and he again stressed the irrevocable nature of the fatwa in 2015.

Thirty years on, not only does Rushdie remain a figure of hate for Islamists across the Muslim world, but the issue of blasphemy - in 2019! - remains an incendiary one; people are still being killed or threatened with death for any perceived insult to God or his prophet Muhammad (the case of Asia Bibi is just the latest grotesque example).   

The problem, of course, is that laws designed to protect religious sensibilities ultimately stifle intellectual debate and artistic expression. Indeed, as Christopher Hitchens notes, the fatwa issued against his friend Rushdie was essentially the opening shot in a war on cultural freedom: after The Satanic Verses controversy came the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004; followed a year later by the Danish cartoon crisis; and then the Charlie Hebdo massacre in 2015 ...

Happily, three decades on, Rushdie is alive and well and - as we'll see in the second part of this post - able to laugh at his own nightmarish experience. Even if, again to quote Hitchens, "the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force".


See: Christopher Hitchens, 'Assassins of the Mind', Vanity Fair (February 2009): click here to read online.

To read part two of this post, click here. 

Rushdie with a copy of his offending text (London, 1989)

Photo credit: PA Photos / Landov