Fate of Salman Rushdie, World Citizen, Is Awaited by the World

Updated at 9:30 P.M. EDTThe news of the attack on Salman Rushdie, stabbed in the neck just as he was to speak at a public event at Chautauqua, New York, brings all sorts of memories to mind, including how writers like Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag, two of my biographical subjects, embraced his cause during the fatwa, an order to kill him issued by the Iranian leader in 1989.This was a time when bookstores canceled Mr. Rushdie’s book signings, when no one knew if open support for the threatened writer could cause them physical harm — or even death, as had been the case with his Japanese translator. Salman Rushdie: The very name became synonymous with the peril of writing in a fractious world.Then Mr. Rushdie became a topic of conversation with Michael Foot, a British Labor Party leader, when I was working on a biography of Foot’s wife, Jill Craigie. Michael and Jill, who became my friends, not only sponsored Mr. Rushdie and his second wife, Elizabeth, during the fatwa but brought him into their home, along with Margaret Thatcher’s security detail. What stood out about Mr. Rushdie in conversation with Elizabeth and with others who knew him was a gift for friendship and his outspokenness. He did not just have the respect of other writers for what he wrote, but the affection of those who became better persons by taking him into their homes and hearts. Mr. Rushdie has an irrepressible humor, always verging on satire, which is, of course, what got him into trouble when in 1988 he published “The Satanic Verses.” In person, Elizabeth told me, he could be endearing and just the kind of charming conversationalist you’d expect after watching him in his appearances on American television.Mr. Rushdie realized that just because he had come out of hiding did not mean he was out of danger. Yet he regarded that danger as coming at not only himself but the rest of us, as well. There was, in effect, no place to hide.One can watch Mr. Rushdie on YouTube in a documentary, “Two Hours From London,” predicting the trouble heading toward us. In that film, he talks about the Balkan wars of the 1990s and the destruction of Dubrovnik, the topic of Jill’s Craigie’s film. It was telling that she filmed him in her own home, because, as with all his writing, he was bringing history home. To be in his presence was to be at a kind of inescapable vector of history.What Mr. Rushdie tells us in that film is that the end of the Cold War settled nothing, and a new generation of terrorists were being recruited even as he spoke. He spared not a moment for even a hint of triumphalism. Mr. Rushdie appeared in 1995 in “Two Hours From London” because, as the title emphasizes, the tragic developments in the former Yugoslavia were not the product of events occurring in a distant land. He wanted his very presence in the film to be a living reminder not only of what happened to him but what was happening in the world at large.And now it has happened again, so to speak, in an attack that prevented him from speaking, an attack — whatever the motivation of the attacker — that is on a world citizen, whose life and work has traveled from East to West, from India to England to America. Salman Rushdie had been involved in finding homes for Ukrainian refugees. He knew what it meant to be homeless and under siege. This attack on his person is not some stray incident — not for him, not for us. His medical condition, as of Friday evening, is serious. He is on a ventilator in a hospital with liver damage and severed nerves in an arm, and he is likely to lose an eye, the Associated Press reported. We await his fate as though it were our own.

Fate of Salman Rushdie, World Citizen, Is Awaited by the World

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