Boualem Sansal runs with the elephants! | EUROtoday

“Lhe crowd, who crowded into the judgment tent, knowing that this was after all the famous satirist poet Baal, in his heyday the owner of the sharpest tongue and the most biting wit in Jahilia, began (despite all their efforts to prevent it) to laugh. […] So he was sentenced to have his head cut off within the hour, and when the soldiers took him roughly from the tent to the place of execution, Baal shouted over his shoulder: “The whores and the writers, Mahound. We are those you can not forgive.” » This extract from Satanic verses, by Salman Rushdie, sums up why autocrats of all occasions and locations can’t tolerate literature. The spirit, the tongue, the laughter and the immorality make the tyrants tremble…