The assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie (Mumbai, 1947) at the Chautauqua Institution in New York will hopefully be just one more of the attacks the writer has experienced since he published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988, and unleashed a controversy that led the Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of Iran and head of his revolution, to proclaim a fatwa against the life of the writer the following year.
A fatwa announced on February 14, 1989, the day that Rushdie was at the funeral of his friend Bruce Chatwin, which led to large demonstrations calling for the death of the Indian narrator – who has lived in the United States since the turn of the millennium – and which has caused, in addition to burned bookstores, a failed attack in which the bomb exploded while the attacker was preparing it and blew up two floors of a hotel in London and deaths such as that of the novel’s translator into Japanese, Hitoshi Igarashi, murdered in 1991, while the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was seriously injured that same year. Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot in 1993, the year in which Rushdie, always hidden, will make a surprising appearance at the U2 concert at Wembley invited by Bono.
What is the cause that Khomeini proclaimed the blasphemous book? Rushdie’s previous books had already provoked controversy, as well as his leftist statements, which included attacking the US for his actions in Nicaragua. Children of Midnight (1981), one of his greatest achievements, which narrates the transition from colonial India to independence and the subsequent separation of Bengal -today Pakistan and Bangladesh-, already caused the anger of Indira Gandhi, and the following, Shame (1983), is a kind of novel in code about the Pakistani political power of the time. But it was The Satanic Verses that changed his life. In the novel, he deals with magical realism -surviving the explosion of a plane included- the lives of two Indian emigrants to the United Kingdom, himself settled in that country since he studied History at King’s College in Cambridge.
The title of the novel, which also deals with the life of the prophet Muhammad, aroused anger: it refers to a legend about Muhammad according to which some verses of the Koran were not inspired by Allah but by the devil, some verses that they allowed to pray to three pagan goddesses of Mecca, a violation of monotheism. To the Muslim world, that story was a heretical fabrication and Rushdie was directly attacking the Koran, insultingly using freedom of expression.
The result was that demonstrations immediately began to take place -7,000 Muslims in Bolton, United Kingdom, in 1988-, the book to be banned in numerous countries -Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Tanzania, Indonesia, Thailand… the last to ban it was Venezuela in 1989- and attacks on bookstores and book burnings multiplied.
In Bradford, United Kingdom, as proof that the affair deeply divided Western society and the Islamic world under the delicate flaw of freedom of expression, Islamic protesters organized a public burning of copies, and there were firebomb attacks on numerous bookstores. from the country. And the deaths began early: six protesters were killed in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 1989, in a protest against the American Cultural Center. It happened just two days before Khomeini’s fatwa, which proclaimed: “We belong to Allah and to Allah we must return. I announce to all brave Muslims in the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam and the Koran, along with the publishers aware of its contents are sentenced to death.”
The Iranian government offered three million dollars for his head and that forced the United Kingdom to protect him from the police and end up breaking diplomatic relations with Iran, which would only be restored with Mohamed Khatami when his government assured that they would no longer seek the death of the Indian writer and Rushdie he was able to come out again after nine years and stop being called Joseph Anton, Joseph for Conrad and Anton for Chekhov.
Everything could have gone differently because after Khomeini’s fatwa, the then president of Iran, Ali Khamenei, today the country’s spiritual leader, suggested that if Rushdie recanted they could forgive him. And Rushdie released a statement acknowledging that “Muslims in many parts of the world are genuinely upset by the publication of my novel. I deeply regret the anguish my publication has caused sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths, this experience has served to remind us that we must all be aware of the sensitivities of others”.
But the apology had no effect. And in fact, after the opening government of Khatami in 2006, the official Iranian agency indicated that the fatwa was still in force and Rushdie himself has explained that every February 14 he receives “a kind of Valentine’s card” from Iran reminding him of it.
In the first months after the fatuous Rushdie and his then wife, Marianne Wiggins, they had to move their homes 56 times, once every three days. The couple was short-lived, and Rushdie himself made a declaration of Islamic faith in the late 1990s, asking his publisher not to publish the book in paperback or allow it to be translated. It proved futile and later the now badly injured writer admitted that he was wrong to try to appease the fundamentalists by representing “a tyrannical and irrational project that attempts to freeze a certain view of Islamic culture in time and silence the progressive voices of the Muslim world.” and pointed out that, now that the 9/11 attacks had taken place, “many people can say, in retrospect, that the fatwa was the prologue and this is the central event.”
