Lhe knife of obscurantism has once again attacked freedom. More than thirty years after the intolerable call for the murder of Salman Rushdie made by the cantor of an Iranian Islamic revolution then in decline, Ruhollah Khomeini, a hand has been found to try to carry out this unworthy order, the August 12, in a small town in New York State.
The attempted assassination of the writer, who has become a symbol of freedom of expression, was perpetrated in a cultural center, on the occasion of a conference, in the manifest absence of security measures particular. Cruel irony, Salman Rushdie was to evoke the United States, where he has lived for two decades and where he was naturalized in 2016, as a refuge for writers in exile. Seriously injured, he was evacuated by helicopter and placed on life support. The host of the scheduled debate was also injured, but more lightly.
County police gave no indication of the motives of the alleged attacker, a resident of New Jersey, in the hours following the tragedy. She simply gave her name, Hadi Matar, and her age, 24. Everything suggests, however, that his motives are linked to the accusations of blasphemy uttered for decades by cynical calculation, as by crass ignorance, against the author of the satanic versespublished in 1988. They transformed the life of their author into hell, since that date he has been walking with a target behind his back.
Under cover of the defense of an Islam presented very abusively as attacked, the attacks against Salman Rushdie, which preceded the publication of the fatwa of Khomeini, were conducive to all manipulations. On the part of the first Guide of the Iranian revolution first of all, Shiite, wanting to pose as a protector of Islam more intransigent than the hated Saudi Arabia, after the initial mobilization of foundations financed by Gulf countries, Sunnis, for a book they probably hadn’t read.
Manipulations on the part of Iranian factions then, who used the 1989 fatwa to calibrate their rivalries. Also from governments, starting with that of the writer’s homeland, India, by electoral calculation. But also many others, who have maintained sinister infernos around this quarrel set up from scratch to better divert attention from much more imperative internal problems for which they were responsible.
Long before the aggression of which Salman Rushdie has just been the victim, this climate thus forged in total impunity has killed. The circle of intolerance widened, until the grotesque, with the translators of the work, assassinated or assaulted. The infernal machine having, for its instigators, proved its effectiveness, this weapon of blasphemy has been duplicated, with the same cynicism using the same ignorance, by the most radical Islamist currents against a background of the rise of political Islam. , such as by jihadist groups.
This perversion of faith has spread like a metastasis. In France, the attack against the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in 2015, like the atrocious assassination of the teacher Samuel Paty, in 2020, are part of this wake that is as deadly as it is insistent. The unbearable attack of which Salman Rushdie was the victim offers no other choice than the intractable defense of the freedom to think and to write. She must suffer no accommodation.