Twenty-three years after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his death warrant on Salman Rushdie and forced on the novelist a decade of hellish seclusion, Rushdie is publishing this week a brilliant memoir of those years of endurance, called “Joseph Anton.” (Rushdie’s security detail asked that he devise an alias and “Joseph Anton”—the first names of Conrad and Chekhov—is what he chose.) Readers of the excerpt from Rushdie’s new book that was published here earlier this month could readily sense the shaming helplessness of his experience and his astonishing capacity to tell the story straight. There is in the memoir a kind of absolute honesty, a willingness to pass clear-eyed judgment on everyone involved—including, most ruthlessly, himself. “Joseph Anton,” which is written in a deliberately distancing, yet scrupulously accurate, third-person voice, is, in its way, as important a book as “Midnight’s Children,” the novel that gave birth to the Rushdie phenomenon, in 1981.

Viewed through the gaudy lens of his press coverage, Rushdie has been able to live an American-based life of flamboyant normalcy: days of serious writing and teaching, nights of tabloid-worthy fun, a rich bounty of friends and family, literary festivals and frequent travel, new projects like the excellent film version of “Midnight’s Children”—in all, a life free of trouble. Well, not quite.

It was probably too much to hope that the publication of “Joseph Anton” would be marked only by the ordinary rituals of reviews and interviews. The fatwa, which never succeeded in killing Rushdie, but which inspired fire-bombings, riots, murders, and huge demonstrations around the world, receded, in 1998, when Iran sought to reëstablish diplomatic ties to Great Britain. Rushdie felt increasingly at liberty and reëntered the world—unguarded and in New York. But some powerful Iranians, including Khomeini’s successors, were never through with Rushdie. He was too rich a target. We’ve seen signs of that again this week. According to the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, newspapers and wire services in Tehran, including the hardline Jomhouri Eslami, are reporting that a religious foundation has upped the reward for murdering Rushdie—the price has gone from $2.8 million to $3.3 million. Hassan Sanei, the head of the foundation, promised that anyone “who carries out this sentence will receive the whole amount immediately.”

How to absorb the sheer persistence of the threat? Rushdie, for his part, chose not to comment on the new price tag. The news sparked a memory of the way that the late Christopher Hitchens, one of Rushdie’s closest and most loyal friends, reacted to the first news of Khomeini’s declaration. It remains exemplary. “When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me,” Hitchens wrote in his memoir, “Hitch-22.” “It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn’t known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined.” Those days are worth recalling now.

Amazingly, the pressure on Rushdie may be even more persistent in his homeland than in the Iranian theocracy. India banned “The Satanic Verses” in October, 1988, four months before Khomeini got around to issuing his fatwa, and, despite its self-celebration as a center of free expression, India has yet to lift the ban. Indian politicians are terrified of losing Muslim support. Last January, Rushdie, who had visited India since the publication of “The Satanic Verses,” had to cancel plans to visit the Jaipur Literary Festival after getting threats from radical Muslim groups and scant support from government officials who were afraid of upsetting Muslim constituents during a regional election campaign. In his justifiable frustration, Rushdie was quick to point out at the time that his work is available in Egypt, Turkey, and Libya, and asked, “Does India want to be a totalitarian country like China?”

“Joseph Anton: A Memoir” is also being published amidst an ominous blast of threats and sometimes violent demonstrations directed, ostensibly, at “Innocence of Muslims,” a crude and ugly film about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. In this case, the object of fury was not the work of a great novelist, but a hideous and stupid video produced, at last report, anyway, by a group of U.S.-based Coptic Christians. (The leadership of the Coptic Archdiocese of America distanced itself from the alleged producers and denounced the film as “offensive.”)

Rushdie was in London this week preparing for publication of “Joseph Anton” and, when asked about the film and the related outbursts in Cairo and Benghazi, he told a writer for the Telegraph, “I always said that what happened to me was a prologue and there will be many, many more episodes like it. This is one of those.” Rushdie certainly did not defend the movie, but he went on to say, “The correct response would be to say it is garbage and unimportant. Clearly, it’s a piece of crap, is very poorly done and is malevolent. To react to it with this kind of violence is just ludicrously inappropriate. People are being attacked who had nothing to do with it and that is not right.”

Rushdie gets it right. The dilemma of the Arab Spring—and the ways that it has, at times, devolved into Arab Winter—is, in part, the dilemma of time. After being ruled by autocrats for so long, and so ruthlessly, competing forces in these countries will be fighting battles over essential questions of liberty, law, order, and faith for decades. Forces as divergent as the myriad groups that sparked the demonstrations in Tahrir Square and the Muslim Brotherhood, which showed itself far more prepared for electoral struggle in the aftermath of the rallies, will ensure that this drama will go on for a long time and take unpredictable turns. While that is happening, reactionary forces from abroad—be it extraterritorial jihadist organizations like Al Qaeda or the mullahs of Iran—will try to influence those struggles using whatever tools are at hand. And the Internet, for all its glories, has created quite a potent toolbox: it is loaded with films, screeds, and declarations of every sort: Nazi manifestos, anti-Muslim tracts, anti-Semitic rants, racist monologues, woman-hating extravaganzas—every shade of ugly, take your pick. These easily accessed, easily exploited clips and texts from the darkest corners of the imagination are bound to go on being occasional instruments in causing explosions in the historical movement toward more open societies—in the Muslim world and elsewhere. It is the sometimes impossibly difficult political and moral work of Rushdie and the rest of us to go on defending freedom of expression even when the object at the center of things is as indefensibly offensive as “Innocence of Muslims” and its countless kin.

Photograph by Richard Avedon.