Writer and journalist Abnousse Shalmani considers Salman Rushdie “one of the greatest living writers of magic realism, along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez”.
“My first reaction is to be upset and to cry”, reacts Abnousse Shalmani, writer, journalist and director, invited Saturday August 13 on franceinfo concerning the aggression of the writer Salman Rushdie. The author of The Satanic Verses is hospitalized on a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck as he prepared to give a lecture in New York State. It was the subject of a fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini.
franceinfo: The writer was the target of a fatwa launched in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, was it inevitable?
Abnousse Shalmani: In 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini launched the fatwa, he was losing momentum. It was a way of rallying the entire Arab-Muslim world behind him. We can consider that it worked since, very quickly, from Pakistan to India, via Iran, the books of the Satanic Verses were burned. We witnessed burnings everywhere, in the Maghreb, in Syria, in Lebanon.
Then Iran, with lip service, announced in 1998 that it would be good to avoid killing Salman Rushdie, but the problem with a fatwa is that from…