In a few days, I was to have introduced Salman Rushdie to an audience in Berkeley, Calif.

Whatever the effect of their death threats may be over the longer term, the Islamic fundamentalists have already deprived Americans of the right to see and hear Mr. Rushdie for themselves. Here is what I would have said: Salman Rushdie is a composer of fiction, immensely various and intelligent fiction, and is devoted principally to the art and subtlety of the imagination and the written word. He knows, as any writer must know, of the law of unintended consequences.

Neither Shelley nor Spinoza nor Galileo desired a confrontation with the monolithic monotheists of their times when they composed, respectively, poetics, philosophy and scientific inquiry. But there are always secular authorities, masquerading as divine, who already know that they are right and who are deaf to the necessity of skepticism. Thanks to them, we will never know what was in the great library at Alexandria (though they cannot forbid us to speculate about what they burned).

By issuing incitements to murder, and by reinforcing these incitements with bounty prices, the obscurantist forces have shown that they are as serious as they ever were. They have invigorated the stale phrases with which we defend free expression in easy times: it is a matter of life and death; we are in deadly earnest about it. At least it would be nice to think so.

Yet where are the voices of the bishops and rabbis and imams, denouncing the exploitation of piety for the ends of suppression, murder and torture? If you think I exaggerate about torture, imagine how you would feel if you heard your death called for on the radio, and had to wonder about yourself and your family for the rest of your life. Imagine Dostoyevsky's credulous Smerdyakov licensed by the holy to kill, multiplied by millions.