SALMAN RUSHDIE STABBED
August 12, 2022 -Durt Fibo

Salman Rushdie is undergoing surgery as I write. A New Jersey man named Hadi Matar repeatedly stabbed the author as he was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in New York about the importance of the US offering asylum for writers and other artists in exile, particularly Ukrainian ones in these months.
The assault was not Matar’s freedom of expression regarding humanistic writing. Rushdie’s literature is often good, but shares the same inexplicable reputation for profundity (“highbrow”) as Umberto Eco. Actually Rushdie is a more a simple storyteller, in the most classical sense.

In September of 1988, Rushdie, a Muslim, published his fourth book, The Satanic Verses. The title refers to sections of the Koran (which was allegedly dictated to Mohammad by the Archangel Gabriel), that were subsequently denounced as having been sneakily dictated by the devil instead. The novel struts along with Rushdie’s usual balance between humor and worldly pathos, and at no point singles out Muslims or the Islamic religion for offense. It does, however, contain a minor running sketch of an exiled Iranian Ayatollah, in Paris around the time Khomeini had been living there, swelling with rage at banishment, fury at all that is not his or him, and vividly scheming for revenge. Those are the parts Ayatollah Khomeini read –or heard about.

Therefore, on 14 February 1989, Khomeini took it upon himself to issue his famous fatwa, ordering the assassination of Salman Rushdie. The fatwa also was directed against any publishers, booksellers, or writers who supported the existence of the novel. A day or so afterwards, Khomeini publicly offered $6 million of Iranian government money for Rushdie’s death.

Some writers openly stated that Rushdie deserved the fatwa. Like most people around the world, very few had read The Satanic Verses. Around that same world, those non-readers, rioted, threatened, bombed and indeed killed. I’ve written elsewhere that any blasphemy laws or rulings –and the notion of blasphemy itself– is a mathematical impossibility; one religion’s blasphemy is another’s requirement. But the damage done to literature was prolonged, and increased, up to this day, when most of it could’ve been ended with one move, which I recommended at the time. British writer Francis King was the President of PEN International in 1989. Within 10 minutes of the fatwa being issued, PEN should have globally published a $6 million reward for the death of Khomeini. Or even doubled the bounty.