Salman Rushdie Attacked, Three Decades After Fatwa

Updated at 9:40 P.M. EDTSalman Rushdie, the Booker-winning novelist who in 1989 had a fatwa levied against him by the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, was attacked on stage and reportedly stabbed in the neck at the Chautauqua Institution on Friday. He had been set to deliver a lecture. The fatwa against him has never been rescinded. Mr. Rushdie was “stabbed in the neck and abdomen,” the AP reported, by an attacker identified as a 24-year-old New Jersey man, Hadi Matar. He was arrested at the scene. As of Friday evening, Mr. Rushdie was hospitalized and on a ventilator, with liver damage and severed nerves in his arm, and he is likely to lose an eye, the AP said.The attack immediately brought to mind the fatwa, which called for Mr. Rushdie’s assassination and put on his head a bounty of about $3 million. He has been knighted for his service to literature. That edict was precipitated by Mr. Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims viewed as blasphemous for its retelling of passages from the Qur’an. Mr. Rushdie was put under security protection by Prime Minister Thatcher and faced an assassination attempt in 1989. He spent years in hiding, amid threats from Iran and its proxies. While Mr. Rushdie had before today escaped direct harm, those who have worked with him have not been so lucky. In 1991, Mr. Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitorshi Igarashi, was found stabbed to death. His Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was seriously wounded in another stabbing. His Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot in the back. His Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, was targeted in a bombing that killed 37 people. In 2016, Iranian state media reported that the bounty on Mr. Rushdie had been raised by $600,000 to emphasize that “Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out,” according to Iran’s deputy culture minister, Seyed Abbas Salehi. Al-Qaeda has also had Mr. Rushdie in its sights: In 2010, he appeared on a “hit list” in its English language publication, Inspire.The attack on Mr. Rushdie comes just days after the Department of Justice charged a member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as part of a plot to kill a one-time American national security adviser, John Bolton. It also follows on the heels of charges brought against an Iranian national, Khalid Mehdiyev, for possessing a firearm outside the home of an Iranian dissident, Masih Alinejad. In 2019, Iran’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, said “Imam Khomeini’s verdict regarding Salman Rushdie is based on divine verses and just like divine verses, it is solid and irrevocable.” In “Joseph Anton: A Memoir,” Mr. Rushdie recounted his years of hiding: Joseph Anton was his pseudonym during this period. In that work, the narrator, a stand-in for the author, recalls “the old Chinese proverb, sometimes ascribed to Confucius: If you sit by the river for long enough, the body of your enemy will float by.”

Salman Rushdie Attacked, Three Decades After Fatwa

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