Someday in the far-distant future...

Someday in the far-distant future, some 23rd-century Mel Brooks may make a satirical film called The History of the World: Part MCXXXXVII. If so, Ayatollah Khomeini, Grand Poohbah of the Islamic Republic of Iran, will have to figure prominently as one of history's most laughable characters.

It's possible, you know. In his real-life, late-'70s opus The History of the World: Part II, the present-day Brooks managed to get a laugh out of the Inquisition. Really. I saw it. It was the funniest bit in the movie.

If such a satire is ever made, Khomeini's $5 million bounty on the head of novelist Salman Rushdie, author of the controversial book The Satanic Verses, will no doubt serve as its farcical centerpiece. But this mini-inquisition may be a little too close for parodic comfort.

There is too much blood lust in the air. Rushdie still lives. But that could easily change tomorrow. So, taking the threat seriously, for now, here are a few things that the Rushdie affair suggests about our modern, and post-modern, world.

First and foremost, it suggests that if five billion wildly diverse and cantankerous human beings are going to knock around on this planet together sharing the same communications satellites, then that quaint, old "Western bourgeois" ideal of free expression must become universal. That may seem self-evident. But a strong case can be made that such a bald pronouncement smacks of cultural imperialism.

Cultural imperialism is a real and debilitating fact of the post-colonialist world. It's the dehumanizing process by which the West has imposed its norms, values, and modes of thought onto the rest of the world as instruments of domination. And the Islamic world has been cruelly victimized by cultural imperialism for centuries. That's what the Iranian revolution of 1979 was largely about.

Much of what I know about cultural imperialism in the Islamic world I learned from reading the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. Especially relevant in this discussion is Said's book Covering Islam, which analyzed the racist demonization of that faith and its adherents by the Western media.

But Edward Said, with all his understanding of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, has come to the defense of Salman Rushdie. There are limits to understanding. Killing people, or locking them up, for what they write in books is one of them.

That said, if Khomeini's call for murder weren't in the picture, we could discern some legitimate questions about global diversity and tolerance beneath the surface of the Rushdie affair. Parts of The Satanic Verses are genuinely offensive to the vast majority of believing Muslims. Even those who think Rushdie has a right to write such things wish he hadn't.

It may be an open-and-shut First Amendment case. But to much of the world, it is also a case of a former Muslim and a Third World expatriate exposing his people and their faith to the ridicule of a white, Western world that has for centuries proved itself eager to ridicule all things Islamic and Third World.

TAKEN SERIOUSLY, the ideal of free expression should provide a solution to those grievances. As always, the answer is not less debate and diversity but more. We should see learned and politically savvy Muslim scholars debating those questions with Salman Rushdie face to face on worldwide television. Through such a process, everyone would learn a lot about Islam and about freedom.

Of course that isn't going to happen. If there were no death threat, it wouldn't have happened because the people who own worldwide satellite hookups don't think the concerns of dark-skinned heathens (Muslim or secular) are worth the air time.

But now such a free and open debate can't happen because Salman Rushdie is in hiding and because Khomeini has again managed to legitimate the Islam-equals-fanaticism equation in Western eyes. In so doing he may have damaged the good name of Islam more than any novel ever could.

Meanwhile, here on the Western front, the point to ponder in all this is just how feeble our commitment to free expression has turned out to be when tested. Canada held up shipments of The Satanic Verses for suspicion of violating anti-racist laws. In West Germany and France, publishing houses backed out of contracts to print the book. Great Britain, of which Rushdie is a citizen, has made only the mildest of gestures to defend his hide.

Here in the land that birthed the notion of an unfettered press, The Satanic Verses became briefly unavailable when a few huge bookstore chains (Barnes and Noble, B. Dalton, Waldenbooks) pulled it off the shelf. They pleaded, irony of ironies, "security reasons." In America the threat to freedom of expression is not from the state, or from religious fanatics, but from corporate monopoly.

Of course that shouldn't be news. Dozens of worthy titles suffer this form of prior censorship every year. It doesn't take a bomb threat. You just have to write a book that too plainly reflects a dissident sensibility of some sort. From publishing (dominated by Gulf and Western and Warner Communications) to the aforementioned mega-retailers, America's intellectual food chain is as monopolized as its agricultural one. And a country in which a handful of corporate executives decides what goes on the nation's bookshelves is not what Mr. Jefferson had in mind.

Danny Duncan Collum was a Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.