Politics & Power Quote by Salman Rushdie

Rushdie takes a word that’s supposed to confer comfort and flips it into an accusation. “Sacred” sounds like reverence, refuge, moral seriousness. He treats it as a cultural technology: a way of freezing a society’s argument in place, then punishing anyone who keeps arguing. The line’s sting comes from its reframing of piety as policing. Once something is declared sacred, debate isn’t merely disrespectful; it becomes deviant. That’s the quiet escalation embedded in the sentence: from “notions” to “crimes.”

The subtext is personal and historical. Rushdie isn’t theorizing from a distance; he’s writing from the pressure chamber of modern blasphemy politics, where offense is not a social mishap but a pretext for censorship, intimidation, even violence. In the wake of The Satanic Verses and the fatwa, “sacred” isn’t an abstract category. It’s a lever that turns fear into public policy and turns writers into test cases.

Calling the sacred “conservative” is less about party politics than about time. Sacredness is an attempt to stop the clock, to make a particular arrangement of belief, power, and identity immune to revision. That’s why Rushdie pairs it with “uncertainty, progress, change” and labels them as targets. Those are the verbs of modern life; they’re also the conditions under which art and pluralism survive. His intent is to defend not just free speech in the legal sense, but the messier freedom to experiment, to doubt, to be wrong in public without being treated as a criminal.