Rushdie ‘On Road to Recovery’ Following Brutal Attack

Salman Rushdie has been taken off a ventilator and can speak, according to the late wires from the Associated Press, and the world will likely harken more than ever to what will be said by a writer who has emerged as a symbol for the values of free speech.Mr. Rushdie’s agent confirmed Sunday that the author is “on the road to recovery,” but added that it would be a lengthy one. “The injuries are severe,” said Andrew Wylie, “but his condition is headed in the right direction.”Prosecutors at the arraignment of the accused assailant, Hadi Matar, asserted that the attack was “targeted, unprovoked” and “preplanned.” They stated that it was “sanctioned by larger groups.” Speculation has centered on the fatwa issued against Mr. Rushdie more than three decades ago by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It underscores the emergence of Mr. Rushdie, who has lived and written under the cloud of the ayatollah’s death sentence, as a champion not only for other novelists, but for journalists and nonfiction writers as well. For years, Mr. Rushdie was forced into hiding, ensconced in security and forced to live under pseudonyms (one of them was “Michael Jackson”).In time, the author would regain the rhythms of a more unencumbered life, shedding the precautions that had been adopted in the early days of the fatwa. He even appeared on a 2017 episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” as himself, counseling Larry David on the amorous upsides of a global death sentence. The fatwa made Mr. Rushdie not only a target but a spokesman for the values that have now put his life at risk. Over the years, Mr. Rushdie became increasingly vocal. In 2012, Mr. Rushdie addressed an audience at New Delhi, and said “A free society is one in which a thousand flowers bloom, in which a thousand and one voices speak. And what a simple and grand idea that seems. It’s like that copper goddess standing in the harbour, enlightening the world. But in our time, many essential freedoms are in danger of defeat, and not only in totalitarian or authoritarian states.”In 2015, in the wake of the attack on the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine that left 12 dead, Mr. Rushdie committed “to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” He added “Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.” The editor of that magazine, Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, who survived that attack and still labors under threats, wrote in an op-ed on Friday, “We are going to have to repeat again and again that nothing, absolutely nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence, of anyone for anything.”More recently, Mr. Rushdie affixed his name to an open letter to “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in July of 2020. That letter asserted “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” and promised to “uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.”The events this week remind us of Mr. Rushdie’s courage, put into sharp relief by the words of the fatwa from more than 30 years ago, informing “all the intrepid Muslims of the world that the author of the book, The Satanic Verses, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, are hereby sentenced to death.” In Mr. Rushdie’s speech a decade ago in India, the writer declared that “the attempt to silence our tongue is not only censorship. It’s also an existential crime about the kind of species that we are. We are a species which requires to speak, and we must not be silenced. Language itself is a liberty and please, do not let the battle for this liberty be lost.”

Rushdie ‘On Road to Recovery’ Following Brutal Attack

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