The freedom to speak and write is a theme which Salman Rushdie passionately as well as intellectually champions in his literary work. His struggle is a continuation of what Renaissance thinkers began in order to disperse the cloud of ignorance and bigotry which shrouded the European intellectual field under the influence of Scholasticism.
The Dark Ages into which the European cultural history was immersed for over thousand years could be brought to an end only when the thinkers imbued by the spirit of untrammelled curiosity began to question at their great personal peril the papal orthodoxy and its exercise of the circumscribing power on society. From Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1486) to Salman Rushdie in late twentieth century, several writers for the cause of artistic and scientific radicalism countered persecution for exercising their right to dispute in public against the canon of conventionality of religious and political authorities.
Even in the twenty first century the argument from the adherents of fundamentalist dogmas for the suppression of free expression remains a live issue. It demands a persistent and renewed engagement with the dialectic of humanist liberalism and the tyranny of uncompromising fundamentalism. In this essay I will argue that the present trend of the executive branch of government in different parts of the world, including my own country, Britain, to muzzle the voice of creative minds in order to placate minority sensibility is reminiscent of Emperor Justinian’s religious bigotry which motivated him to disband the academy of Platonic philosophy in AD 529 and thus bringing about Europe’s cultural asphyxiation which began to be removed with the advent of the Renaissance.