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Salman Rushdie called it his \u201cunfunny Valentine\u201d. On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran\u2019s supreme leader, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims around the world to kill the author and placing a multimillion-dollar bounty on his head. What had prompted this death sentence? The previous year, Rushdie released his fourth novel,\u00a0The Satanic Verses, a book that some Muslims considered to be blasphemous because of its fictionalised, sometimes satirical portrayal of the prophet\u00a0Muhammad. The\u00a0Ayatollah\u2019s decree\u00a0turned Rushdie\u2019s life upside down instantly, forcing the celebrated writer into hiding for a decade. It has cast a long shadow ever since.<\/p>\n
There are few books over which so much blood has been spilt as\u00a0The Satanic Verses. In 1991, the book\u2019s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered; the Norwegian publisher and Italian translator were later viciously attacked. And in 2022, at a point when Rushdie was finally living what he called \u201ca relatively normal\u201d life, the writer was\u00a0stabbed in a horrific attack\u00a0on stage at a literary event in upstate New York.\u00a0The incident\u00a0left Rushdie blind in one eye and unable to use one of his hands. These injuries, though, haven\u2019t held back the indomitable author from his work. This month sees the release of\u00a0Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a memoir exploring the aftermath of the attack, which\u00a0Rushdie\u00a0has described as \u201ca way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art\u201d.<\/p>\n
By the late Eighties, Rushdie was one of the biggest names in contemporary literature. He was born to a\u00a0wealthy,\u00a0liberal Muslim family in Mumbai, then known as Bombay, in 1947, the year of the\u00a0partition of India.\u00a0At the age of 13, he was sent to England to attend Rugby School in Warwickshire, then later won a scholarship to King\u2019s College, Cambridge (which he had to be persuaded to take up by his father, fearing the university \u201cwould be a continuation of the same racist treatment\u201d he\u2019d experienced at Rugby).\u00a0He began writing while working for\u00a0the\u00a0London\u00a0ad agency\u00a0Ogilvy & Mather,\u00a0coining slogans like \u201cthat\u2019ll do nicely\u201d for American Express and \u201cirresistibubble\u201d for Aero chocolate bars. His debut novel\u00a0Grimus\u00a0came out in 1975,\u00a0but it was his sprawling, often surreal second book,\u00a0Midnight\u2019s Children, a fantastical allegory of partition and its legacy, which made his reputation.\u00a0It won\u00a0the Booker Prize in 1981 (and has twice been declared the best ever Booker winner since then) and would go\u00a0on to sell more than one million copies\u00a0in the UK alone. Rushdie later\u00a0admitted\u00a0that pirate copies \u201cprobably sold 10 times as much as the legal edition\u201d in India; the bootleggers would send the author birthday cards to thank him for making them rich.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0then\u00a0Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi took Rushdie to court over a single sentence in the book, one that seemed to imply she was responsible for the death of her husband (the case was settled when the writer agreed to remove the line). But this controversy would pale in comparison to the furore provoked by\u00a0The Satanic Verses\u00a0when\u00a0it was published in September 1988.\u00a0The book tells the story of two actors, both from Indian Muslim backgrounds, who are miraculously saved when a hijacked plane explodes over the English Channel. In the dream sequence which follows, Rushdie re-imagines\u00a0Muhammad\u00a0as a loosely fictionalised character named Mahound (used to refer\u00a0to a\u00a0false prophet\u00a0since the time of the\u00a0Crusades). He also invokes a contested episode in the prophet\u2019s life, in which Satan inspires him to allow the worship of three pagan goddesses in Mecca; these \u201csatanic verses\u201d don\u2019t appear in the\u00a0standard\u00a0version of the Quran, and the portrayal of a potentially fallible\u00a0Muhammad\u00a0was considered by some as deeply blasphemous.<\/p>\n
Rushdie knew that his work would likely cause a stir. But he had no idea of the scale and speed of the backlash. \u201cI expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public,\u201d he said\u00a0in 1992. India and Pakistan banned the book in late 1988; the following year, six protesters died in an attack on the American Cultural Centre in Islamabad. Copies of the book were burned in Bradford, England.<\/p>\n
And then came the fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini, broadcast on Iranian radio, condemning Rushdie, \u201calong with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents\u201d to death (Khomeini\u2019s son would later admit that his father had never read\u00a0The Satanic Verses). That 14\u00a0February\u00a0was also the funeral of the author Bruce Chatwin, a close friend of Rushdie. After the ceremony, fellow novelist Paul Theroux darkly joked that \u201cnext week, we\u2019ll be back here for you\u201d. The UK government immediately provided Rushdie with a round-the-clock security detail.<\/p>\n
Controversy: Salman Rushdie published \u2018The Satanic Verses\u2019 in 1988 (PA)In the five months immediately following the fatwa, Rushdie and his then-wife Marianne Wiggins moved 56 times, with the writer using the fake name \u201cJoseph Anton\u201d (a nod to Conrad and Chekhov). Their first stop was the Lygon Arms, a hotel in the Cotswolds. The protection team had asked Rushdie where he wanted to spend the weekend; thinking the media storm would soon abate, he simply chose a venue that he had always fancied visiting. \u201cThe general view then was that this was such an absurdity that it would not be allowed to persist,\u201d he later told\u00a0GQ. \u201cAnd that if I just lay low for a few days, the politicians would sort it out.\u201d A married tabloid journalist was staying in the room next door with his girlfriend, with no idea that the potential scoop of his life was on the other side of his bedroom wall. Rushdie then headed to Wales, where his former agent Deborah Rogers owned a farm. It was a very literary double bluff:\u00a0Rogers\u2019s\u00a0bolthole seemed an improbable spot for the writer to take shelter, as his recent departure from her company had been well-discussed in the press.<\/p>\n
From there, the couple kept on moving. Fractures started to\u00a0occur\u00a0in their marriage. Rushdie and Wiggins announced their break-up in July that year, a split\u00a0that\u00a0the author put down to \u201cthe tension of being at the centre of an international controversy, and the irritations of spending all hours of the day together in seclusion\u201d. Living in a string of safe houses and constantly accompanied by his Secret Service minders, Rushdie watched\u00a0Dynasty\u00a0re-runs and became, by his own admission, \u201ca master of\u00a0Super Mario [Bros] I\u00a0and II\u201d. He continued to write too: Blake Morrison, then the literary editor of\u00a0The Observer, said that Rushdie still managed to meet the deadline for a review of the latest Philip Roth novel, days after he had been spirited away by the security services. In 1990, he released\u00a0In Good Faith, a defence of\u00a0The Satanic Verses\u00a0and an exploration of his life after the fatwa, and a children\u2019s book,\u00a0Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his son Zafar; another novel,\u00a0The Moor\u2019s Last Sigh, followed in 1995.<\/p>\n
The literary world, for the most part, rallied around Rushdie; some of his fellow writers organised readings of\u00a0The Satanic Verses\u00a0and even, like Rogers, housed him for short stints. But there were a few outliers. John le Carr\u00e9 famously refused to back Rushdie, as he believed \u201cthat there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity\u201d. And although the British government had provided him with security, politicians weren\u2019t necessarily on his side: Tory MP Norman Tebbit branded Rushdie an \u201coutstanding villain\u201d in the pages of\u00a0The Independent, describing his life as \u201ca record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality\u201d.<\/p>\n
Aftermath: the author was left blind in one eye after the attack (PA)The controversy only seemed to strengthen Rushdie\u2019s commitment to free speech. \u201cWhat is freedom of expression?\u201d he asked in\u00a0In Good Faith.\u00a0\u201cWithout the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.\u201d In an address at Columbia University the following year, he described free speech as \u201clife itself\u201d \u2013 and the attack in the summer of 2022 certainly proved it could be a matter of life or death. In 1998, Iran seemed to backtrack slightly on the fatwa, claiming it would \u201cneither support nor hinder\u201d Rushdie\u2019s killing. Two years later, he moved to New York, where he lived comparatively freely. In 2022, he told the German magazine\u00a0Stern\u00a0that his security precautions had relaxed over the years, and that the fatwa felt like \u201clong ago\u201d. On\u00a012 August, he had been due to give a lecture on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution, but as he arrived on stage, a man rushed towards him, stabbing him around\u00a0a dozen\u00a0times and injuring interviewer Henry Reese. The attack left Rushdie on a ventilator and unable to speak; he would spend around six weeks in hospital. Hadi Matar, 24 at the time of the attack, was arrested and charged with one count of second-degree attempted murder and another of second-degree assault; he has pleaded not guilty, and the trial is set to take place later this year.<\/p>\n
Typing remains a challenge for Rushdie, as he still lacks feeling in some fingertips. The creative process has been fraught too. \u201cI sit down to write, and nothing happens,\u201d he told\u00a0The New Yorker last year. \u201cI write, but it\u2019s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day.\u201d But even if the attack has made writing itself difficult, it seems that Rushdie remains undaunted \u2013 and that this life-changing episode will not diminish the scope of his imagination. \u201cI could write frightened or revenge books, and both would make me a creature of the event,\u201d he has said. \u201cSo I thought: be the writer that you want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emailsSign up to our free breaking news emails Salman Rushdie called it his \u201cunfunny Valentine\u201d. On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran\u2019s supreme leader, issued a fatwa calling on Muslims around the world to kill the author […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n