This Friday’s attack on Salman Rushdie occurs 33 years after the writer first received the death threats.
The British novelist of Indian origin, stabbed in the neck this Friday while participating in an event in New York, has been in the crosshairs of religious fanatics for much of his five decades of literary career.
Many of the books by this author of 75 years have been very successful. His second novel, “Children of Midnight”, won in 1981 the Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious in English.
But it was his fourth novel, published in 1988, “The verses satanic”, the most controversial, as it caused an international upheaval of a magnitude never seen before.
- The writer Salman Rushdie is stabbed in an auditorium in New York when he was going to give a talk
Ayatollah Khomeini, at the time Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in 1988, a year after the publication of the book, a fatwa in which he asked to kill the novelist and promised reward his murderer with $3 million dollars.
The Iranian government stopped promoting the fatwa in 1998, but in 2016 took it back and offered $600,000 additional dollars to whoever managed to end his life.
Death threats against Rushdie multiplied, which had to living in hiding for more than ten years, and the British government put the author under police protection.
The United Kingdom and Iran broke off diplomatic relations, and Western authors and intellectuals from various countries denounced the threat to freedom of expression posed by the reaction to the book by many radical Islamists.
A rising race
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947, two months before India’s independence from the UK.
To the 14 years he was sent to England , where he studied at the prestigious Rugby School and later graduated with an honors degree in history from Kings College, Cambridge. He then acquired British citizenship.
Rushdie belonged to a family with a Muslim tradition but did not practice that religion.
“I never considered myself a writer concerned with religion, until a religion began to persecute me,” he later wrote in an article.
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He worked briefly as an actor and then as a copywriter while writing novels.
His first book, “Grimus” (1947), did not achieve great success, although some critics highlighted his potential as a writer.
It took him five years to write his second book, “Children of Midnight”, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, received good reviews and sold half a million copies.
While “Midnight’s Children” located its plot in India, Rushdie’s third novel, “Shame”, published in 1981 , critically addressed the problems of post-colonial Pakistan.
Four years later, Rushdie wrote “The Jaguar’s Smile”, an account of a trip to Nicaragua.
In September 976 published the work that put a price on his life: “The satanic verses”.
The satanic verses
This surreal and postmodern novel provoked the outrage of Muslims around the world who considered its content blasphemous.
India was the first country to ban it.
Pakistan did the same, as did other Muslim countries and South Africa.
The work was praised in many fields and won the Whitbread Prize for a novel. But violent reactions to the book increased and two months later street protests took place.
The radicals considered it an insult to Islam. They were scandalized, among other things, by the fact that two prostitutes had the names of the wives of the Prophet Mohammed.
The title of the book refers to two verses removed by Mohammed from the Koran, because he believed they were inspired by the devil.
In the key of magical realism and inspired by events and characters of the moment, Rushdie narrates in “The Satanic Verses ” the story of two Indian actors who miraculously survive a plane crash caused by an attack.
A series of stories alluding to the mythology of Islam and life are intertwined around the main narrative. of his prophet, Mohammed.
The reactions to the work
Jan January of 1975 Muslim radicals in Bradford (UK) burned a copy of the book in a kind of ritual and WHSmith bookstores they stopped exhibiting it.
Rushdie refuted the accusations of blasphemy, but also apologized to those offended.
In February of that year several people died in riots against Rushdie in the Indian subcontinent, the British embassy in Tehran was stoned and Iran put a price on the author’s head.
In the United Kingdom some Muslim leaders urged restraint, while others supported the Ayatollah.
United States, France and other countries or Westerners condemned the death threat.
Although Rushdie, who lived in hiding for years under police protection, expressed deep regret for the unrest he had caused on the part of Muslims, the Ayatollah reiterated his call to the death of the author.
The London offices of Viking Penguin, the publishers, were the scene of demonstrations and those in New York received death threats.
But the The book became a bestselleron both sides of the Atlantic.
The protests against the extreme Muslim reaction were backed by the countries of the European Economic Community, which temporarily withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran.
Other victims
The author was not the only victim of the content of “The Satanic Verses”.
The translator Japanese in the novel was found dead at a university northeast of Tokyo in July 1991.
The police reported that Hitoshi Igarashi, who was working as an assistant professor of comparative culture, was stabbed multiple times and left in the hallway outside his office at the University of Tsukuba.
Earlier that month the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan, although he survived the attack.
Rushdie’s latest books include a novel for children, “Harun and the sea of stories” (1981), a book of essays, “Patrias Imaginarias” (1991), and the novels “East, West” (1994), “The last breath of the Moor” (1995), “The ground under his feet” (1999) and “Fury” (2001).
He participated in the theatrical adaptation of “Midnight’s Children”, which premiered in London at 2003.
In the last two decades he has published “The ground under his feet”, “The Enchantress of Florence”, “Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights”, “The Decline of Nero Golden” and “Don Quixote”.
Rushdie has been married four times and has two children. He was knighted in the British Empire in 2007 for his services to literature and now lives in New York.
In 2012 he posted “Joseph Anton. Memories of the time of the fatwa”, an account of his life as a result of the controversy over “The satanic verses”.
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