Author Salman Rushdie was the victim of a violent stabbing attack Friday in Chautauqua, New York. Stabbed in the neck and abdomen in the middle of a lecture by a 24-year-old man who appeared on stage, the 75-year-old writer was put on life support after emergency surgery. The latest news about his health is not reassuring.
This attack, the perpetrator of which was immediately arrested and taken into custody, comes 33 years after a call for assassination launched by Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini. On February 14, 1989, this fundamentalist religious dignitary called on Muslims around the world to shoot the writer. At the heart of this “fatwa”: the publication, a year earlier, of satanic verses, best seller of Salman Rushdie that unleashed the fury of Islamists around the world. Turning it, in turn, into a symbol of freedom of expression and the fight against religious obscurantism.
“blasphemous” paragraphs
“It’s really a novel, a work of fiction,” recalls former Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti on BFMTV. “In fact, it is a page, some paragraphs of this novel that have been considered blasphemous.”
the satanic verses follows the eventful arrival of two Indian immigrants to the UK. The only survivors of a terrorist attack on the plane that was taking them to London are suspected of being illegal immigrants. The book narrates his trajectories exploring recurring themes in the bibliography of the Indian Salman Rushdie: migration, dual culture, uprooting and the challenges they present.
“Of all the ironies, the saddest is having worked for five years to give voice to […] to the culture of immigration […] and seeing my book burned, most of the time without having been read, by these same people he talks about, ”the writer lamented, years later, in statements collected by AFP.
Religious dispute and “political pretext”
The outraged reactions of the fundamentalist communities were almost instantaneous: according to reports Point, the novel ended up banned from sale in several Muslim countries where protests against the author took place. Because the satanic verses briefly evokes a Muslim theological dispute: verses suggested by the devil to Muhammad in which the prophet would have recognized the existence of other deities besides Allah. These few verses would then have been erased from the Koran, still according to Point. An episode in the life of the prophet questioned by many branches of the Muslim religion.
In addition, one of the characters in Salman Rushdie’s novel wishes to establish a new religion and recalls the Prophet Mohammed. In fiction, this protagonist agrees to inscribe these “satanic verses” inspired by the devil.
A life under police protection
All this is just “a completely secondary point of Muslim theology in the book”, recalls Éric Naulleau for BFMTV. For the essayist, Khomeini’s fatwa is actually a “political pretext taken by the Iranian regime.” Because one of the characters in the novel acts as a critic of the Ayatollah himself: Salman Rushdie plays an imam who returns to Iran after years of exile to attack his people.
The fatwa against the author was never lifted and many of the novel’s translators or editors were injured. In 1991, the Japanese translator Histoshi Igarashi was even murdered, the victim of several stab wounds.
Long after the publication of satanic verses, Salman Rushdie was forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from hiding place to hiding place. He named himself Joseph Anton, after his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
french support
He was appointed Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by Jack Lang, then Minister of Culture, in February 1993. “Many were afraid that Salman Rushdie would come to Paris,” recalls the president of the Institut du monde Arab, who denounces on BFMTV an “abominable attack”:
“We considered that we were risking I don’t know what attack. At that time, I was Minister of Culture and I decided with Mr. Bourgois (author’s French publisher, editor’s note) to publish ‘Les Versets sataniques’ in French to show that France is a country of freedom and that a writer like Salman Rushdie obviously had the right to be known, published, translated in France”.
“That’s how I welcomed him in February 1993 in Paris, against the wishes of a good part of the political class at the time, perhaps quite cowardly, and part of the press as well,” he continues. “And thanks to the support of President François Mitterrand, I was able to gather around him writers, artists, to show France’s solidarity with Salman Rushdie.”
Starting in 1993, tired of being “an invisible man”, Salman Rushdie multiplied his travels and public appearances, while remaining under the surveillance of the British government.
Source: BFM TV
