Nilanjana S Roy: The fatwa that almost was

SPEAKING VOLUMES

Think of censorship or threats to the freedom of speech, and what comes to mind?

Ayatollahs issuing fatwas; hooligans vandalising public libraries in order to demonstrate an unrighteous rage; jittery dictatorships nervous about the dissemination of controversial ideas? Or a relatively obscure department of the US government?

Over the last few months, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, an offshoot of the US Treasury Department, almost succeeded in doing what only the most stringently-controlled dictatorships have managed. They came close to shutting down free speech and crippling the right of writers to be heard.

Their weapon of choice was red tape rather than the religious fatwa, but if OFAC's amendments to the regulations had gone through, it would have had just as chilling an effect on dissident writing.

Citing the 1917 Trading With The Enemy Act and other regulations, OFAC proposed a series of amendments that would have had a particularly nasty impact on publishing. The Treasury Department lists several embargoed countries""Sudan, North Korea, and Iran currently head the list.

Under the new regulations, US publishers would not be allowed to market books written by citizens of these countries; authors from those countries would not be able to sign agreements with US agents or publishers for new books; editors could not make "substantive" alterations to any manuscript by an author from one of the countries on the list.

As Salman Rushdie said, in his capacity as the president of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, the OFAC regulations would have established "a literary quarantine".

One of the authors directly affected by the new amendments was Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, Iranian dissident and outspoken critic, who would have been barred from publishing her memoirs in the US.

She filed a lawsuit, backed by PEN and supported by a chunk of the US publishing industry, challenging the OFAC amendment. This week, the Treasury Department backed down. The rules, said undersecretary Stuart Levy, would have created a situation in its ban on dissident speech, which would have accomplished "the opposite of what we want".

At present, under the new rules, the publishing ban only extends to official documents from the embargoed countries.

To understand how close the US came to mimicking the value systems of the very regimes it wars against, read Rushdie's declaration. He spoke of the days when the Ayatollah's fatwa ensured that several countries including India banned The Satanic Verses.

His books, however, had always been published in the US; now he saw a tradition of free speech that had been passed down from the days of the first American writers coming under threat.

By closing the door to collaborations between writers from regimes and countries on the blacklist, Rushdie argued, the US was going back on its own history of collaboration with people from other countries, curiosity and support for those who merited one and needed the other.

You might shrug your shoulders at this point and say that the OFAC regulations didn't, after all, go through in their original form. Writers from Cuba, from Iran, from Sudan, will continue to be able to find publishers, agents, editors and an audience in the United States.

This is often crucial for those already embattled by politics in their home country. When you are blacklisted by your own land, it becomes even more important to have some sort of forum abroad""and the US is one of the largest territories in the publishing world.

Dissident writers cannot afford to lose the chance to be heard in the US; it took a battle to ensure that they didn't lose this chance, but hey, the righteous won.

But too many of us are conscious of how close this could have been. It took the combined efforts of half-a-dozen influential US publishers, eminent academic institutions, a writers' movement and a Nobel Peace Prizewinner's lawsuit to get OFAC's laws overturned.

The regulations were first mooted in September 2003; the publishing industry's objections became sharper in spring, when an institution wrote to OFAC for a detailed explanation of these tangled regulations, and got a reply they didn't like at all; and it took another six months to win at least this stage of the battle.

Over at MoorishGirl.com, a popular and incisive literary weblog, Laila Lalami compiled a brief list of authors who would have been unread in the US if the OFAC regulations had been in force over the last year or so. Her list included Tayeb Salih and Reinaldo Arenas; others added Marjane Satrapi, Azar Nafisi, and the like.

It scares me to think that these voices might have lost their force, their chance to be heard, thanks to a bunch of droning regulations issued by a minor Treasury Department.

If you think of censors, you think of fanatics with the eyes of witch-hunters, the minds of minions in the Spanish Inquisition, the rage of Ayatollahs, the secret fears of a mob that knows its voice is, ultimately, inconsequential.

But a fanatic has a face; a bunch of regulations concerning section (1)a and subclause 7.i.ii is the 21st century version of a Faceless Fiend.

Perhaps what is frightening about OFAC is the veneer of utterly boring normalcy around the process. There are no enemies; no men with alien faces and customs to hate.

There are no dictators, in the sense in which we've been trained to spot them""no midnight knocks at the door, no actual, physical mass graves.

But OFAC would have strangulated free speech just as effectively as any of the other monsters whose faces we've learned to recognise, from the mad mullah to the godfearing guardian of morality in the Bible belt. And the men behind OFAC would have had the bland, everyday faces of a committee.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com