Hang in there Sir Rushdie!

Copyright ©  Françoise Herrmann

Stabbed multiple times, on Friday, August 12, 2022, on the Chautauqua Amphitheater stage, in New York City, just before giving a lecture, Sir Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, is fighting for his life. With an Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini-issued fatwa, sentencing him to death, since 1989, Sir Rushdie lived in hiding for more than 10 years, before moving to the United States. A fatwa is a judicial ruling issued by a religious Muslim leader. In the case of Sir Salman Rushdie, the fatwa is a death sentence, for both the author and publishers of The Satanic Verses. A death sentence, that any Muslim might carry out, and which also currently includes a fundraised $3.3 million dollar bounty.

Knighted in Great Britain, in 2007, for his services to literature, Sir Rushdie used the name Joseph Anton in hiding, which he then used as the title of his autobiographical memoir Joseph Anton (2012), aka Sir Salman Rushdie. The name Joseph Anton, is a portmanteau combining the names of favorite authors Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

The Satanic Verses is a work of fiction inspired by the life of the Prophet Muhammad. The book, considered blasphemous by certain religious leaders, was banned in all countries with large Muslim populations, except Turkey. Thus, such countries as Egypt, Pakistan, and the Gulf States, have made possession of the book a punishable offense.

The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death, in Tokyo, in 1991. The Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed and injured in 1991. The Norwegian Publisher of the book, William Nygaard, was shot three times, in an attempted assassination in Olso, in 1993. In 1989, several bookstores were also bombed in the UK.

According to Rushdie, the crime of The Satanic Verses is transgression of the following: “One may not discuss Muhammad as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time. These are the taboos against which The Satanic Verses has transgressed.” (Quoted in The Hill)

Below, the riveting opening paragraph of one of Rushdie’s twelve best-selling novels, Midnight’s Children, awarded the British Booker Prize, for best novel of the year in 1981.

"I WAS BORN in the city of Bombay … once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more … On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. A few seconds later, my father broke his big toe; but his accident was a mere trifle when set beside what had befallen me in that benighted moment, because thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades, there was to be no escape. Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity. I was left entirely without a say in the matter. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate—at the best of times a dangerous sort of involvement. And I couldn’t even wipe my own nose at the time." (Extracted from Midnight's Children)

References
Rai, S. (Aug. 12, 2022). What you need to know about Salman Rushdie and the fatwa against him.
https://thehill.com/homenews/3598309-what-you-need-to-know-about-salman-rushdie-and-the-fatwa-against-him/

Rushdie, S. (1981). Midnight’s Children. Penguin Books: New York, NY.

Rushdie, S. (1988 in the UK, 1989 in the US). The Satanic Verses. Viking Penguin: New York, NY.

Rushdie, S. (2012 ). Joseph Anton: A memoir. Random House: New York, NY.