Rushdie felt safe after years of getting on with his life
THE long-dormant political firestorm that once threatened to engulf Salman Rushdie has reignited after the author was stabbed in the neck in New York.
Rushdie, one of the most acclaimed and influential literary figures of his generation, had long ago emerged from the decade he spent in hiding amid the anger provoked by his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
He had been accused of blasphemy against Islam, and Iran’s spiritual leader at the time ordered his assassination with a fatwa, or edict.
Yesterday’s attack before a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state was a potent reminder of the lingering threat.
The Satanic Verses, which was critically lauded, featured a prophet named after a derogatory term for the prophet Muhammad, and prostitutes named after Muhummad’s wives.
In the worldwide protests that followed the book’s publication, 59 people were killed. Bookshops in Britain and the United States and the offices of a community newspaper in New York were bombed.
Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini said that even if Rushdie apologised and ‘‘became the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to hell’’.
In August 1989, Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh, a would-be assassin, accidentally blew himself up in a London hotel room while working on a bomb to kill
Rushdie. The novel’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in 1991, and two years later its Norwegian publisher was shot and seriously injured.
Despite the threats, and many of the shops brave enough to stock the book hiding it behind the counter, The Satanic Verses became a bestseller and prompted a debate over free speech in the West.
In 1998, Iran said it no longer supported the fatwa against Rushdie, but the threats on his life lingered.
He lived with an around-theclock security detail, and moved often. International travel became almost prohibitively difficult – for many years, British Airways would not permit Rushdie on its planes because of the danger posed to its staff.
A decade ago, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty on Rushdie’s head from US$2.8 million to
US$3.3m. The author dismissed the threat at the time.
Rushdie also released a 2012 book about his time in hiding, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, after the pseudonym he used. While promoting the book, he said he had no regrets about writing The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie did, however, say he regretted going into hiding and said he should have refused.
In 2015, he told The Times that for the past 16 years he had been ‘‘walking around the streets for all that time, taking the subway and catching taxis with Muslim taxi drivers’’.
In 2019, the BBC claimed the fatwa had been requested by a British Muslim leader, Kalim Siddiqui, who was the director of Britain’s pro-Iranian Muslim Institute and visited Iran before the fatwa was declared.