The knife attack perpetrated this Friday against Salman Rushdie occurs more than 33 years after the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, supreme guide of the Iranian Islamic revolution, which sentenced the writer to death.
On February 14, 1989, in a fatwa (religious decree), Rouhollah Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute the author of the book, the publishers and “those who know its contents”, “so that no one insults the Islamic sanctities”. .
A hefty reward is being offered for the death of the writer, accused of ridiculing the Koran and Mohammed in his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which is already setting fire to parts of the Muslim world.
Rushdie hides, he is escorted by bodyguards. During the first six months, he changed residences 56 times.
A fiction with picaresque adventures
The affair began in September 1988, with the publication of this fiction by a British publisher, at a time when no one yet perceived the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
Rushdie tells the picaresque adventures of two Indians, who die in a terrorist attack on their plane. Thanks to the imagination of the writer, a former teacher in the field of magical realism, they arrive safely on an English beach and mix with London emigrants, in the midst of Thatcher (1980s).
It is above all a novel about the uprooting of immigrants. “Of all the ironies, the saddest is having worked for five years to give voice (…) to the culture of immigration (…) and seeing my book burned, most of the time without having been read, for this same town of which he speaks”, the writer will write.
A wave of outrage in the Muslim world…
As soon as it was published, a wave of outrage swept through the Muslim world, where people cried out against blasphemy and apostasy.
It is the second chapter (a few tens of pages out of several hundred) that causes a scandal. Rushdie paints there scenes where the character, vaguely ridiculous, of the prophet Mahound -in allusion to the founder of Islam, Mohammed-, deceived by Satan, preaches the belief in other divinities than Allah, before admitting his mistake.
In India in October, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi banned the book in hopes of winning back Muslim votes for future legislative elections. It is followed by a score of countries.
…that reaches the whole world
In January 1989, copies were burned in a public square in Bradford, in the north of England.
Its publication in the United States unleashed even more passions. Authors like Susan Sontag or Tom Wolfe organize public readings. In Pakistan, thousands of people attack the American cultural center in Islamabad, shouting: “American dogs”, “Hang Rushdie!”. Police shoot: five dead.
Protests are pouring in from around the world, especially from Europe, where the resolution of the “Rushdie affair” will be seen as a prerequisite for any normalization with the Islamic Iranian regime.
London and Tehran severed diplomatic relations for almost two years. On March 2, 700 intellectuals from around the world support Rushdie’s right to free speech.
Threatened at every public appearance
Khomeini dies in June. Rushdie explained himself the following year, as a sign of appeasement, in an essay titled “In Good Faith.” But the anger does not subside.
In 1991, when Rushdie began to reappear in public again, his Japanese translator was stabbed to death and his Italian and Norwegian counterparts assaulted.
Two years later, 37 people were killed when their hotel in Turkey was set on fire by protesters against the Turkish translator, who survived.
In 1998, the Iranian government of reformist President Mohammad Khatami promised that Iran would not implement the decree. But, in 2005, the supreme guide, Ali Khamenei, reaffirms that killing Rushdie is still authorized by Islam.
He continued to defend satire and irreverence.
When the novelist, who was the target of numerous assassination attempts, was knighted by the Queen of England in 2007, Iran spoke of an act of “Islamophobia” and Muslim extremists, especially in Pakistan, were furious again.
In 2016, various Iranian media, in a context of tensions within the regime between Orthodox and Reformists, added $600,000 to the bonus offered by the writer’s head, bringing the total amount to more than $3 million.
Settled for a long time in New York, Salman Rushdie, 71, has resumed a more or less normal life while defending, in his books, satire and irreverence. He had pointed out in recent years that with social media the fatwa would have been more dangerous for him.
Source: BFM TV
