Years. Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding, under police protection, for a novel that his critics at the time did not read – starting, in all likelihood, with Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran which sentenced him to death in 1989. The allusion in his book to verses said “satanic”, which the Koran briefly refers to, and which occupy only a few paragraphs of the 600-page work, was enough.
Friday, August 12, the threat caught up with her. Salman Rushdie has been put on life support after being stabbed in the neck and abdomen as he prepared to speak at a conference in New York state. He was to discuss the subject of “America as an asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for creative freedom”.
Following his attack, on the stage of an amphitheater of a cultural center in Chatauqua, Mr. Rushdie was transported by helicopter to the hospital. The British writer of Indian origin, 75, spent several hours in the operating room. “The news is not good”, his agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement shortly after. “Salman is likely to lose an eye, the nerves in his arm have been severed and his liver has been stabbed and damaged,” he added.
The assailant, aged 24 and identified by the police as Hadi Matar, is from the neighboring state of New Jersey. He was immediately arrested and taken into custody. The authorities have not said anything, at this stage, about the motive for the attack. But according to the first elements collected by the audiovisual group NBC, a preliminary examination of his accounts on social networks would reveal sympathies for the Iranian regime and the Revolutionary Guards, the ideological army of the regime. Without any link being established, at this stage, between Hadi Matar and Tehran.
“Magical Realism”
These “satanic verses”, who gave the title of a book whose literary theme, marked by “magical realism” of which Rushdie was one of the paragons, are centered on the paradoxical realities of the difficult integration of the Indo-Pakistani immigrant communities in Britain – and not on questions of Islamic theology.
The controversy initially stirred up in 1989 by the ayatollahs’ regime can be reduced to the way the author of Indian origin used sura 53 of the Koran – and only verses from 19 to 23 – to feed the dialogues of the two main characters of his book.
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