“What Salman Rushdie embodies is freedom of expression in the face of Islamism and fundamentalisms, and he paid for it in several ways”
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On could believe a performance of a Shakespeare play. A man enters the scene and stabs another without the latter having time to react. We are not at the theater, but in a large conference hall in New York State, the Chautauqua Institution. The victim of this gesture is Salman Rushdie, one of the greatest contemporary writers, marked by a fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
This death sentence issued against the author of the satanic verses, a work considered blasphemous, has never been retracted since. A fatwa is a phantom with the very concrete power to reduce the British-American author to a shadow, under police protection, and his book to a curse.
By this fatwa, in 1989, religious violence penetrated the West in a noisy way, inaugurating an era of threats and attacks. The war against the power of fantasy and freedom of expression thus illustrates major geopolitical contours. Unable to reach Rushdie himself, the Islamists turned to his literary collaborators. In 1991, its Japanese translator was killed, its Italian translator stabbed and, two years later, its Norwegian publisher shot dead.
Widespread embarrassment
As recently as 2016, 40 public media organizations in Iran banded together to raise $600,000 to raise the writer’s bounty to $3 million today. Abbas Salehi, the then Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, said: “Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or die out. » Meanwhile, the attacks on charlie and Samuel Paty inserted themselves into the base opened by this fatwa.
In this open conflict, a veil of ambiguity characterized the British attitude towards its famous national. Already in 1992, the momentum of solidarity towards him had died out. The English authorities, like those of other Western states, were embarrassed by the Rushdie affair, against the backdrop of an attempt to re-establish diplomatic relations with Iran. Among the most bitter critics of the writer were the Archbishop of Canterbury and that of New York, as well as the chief rabbi of England. The singer Cat Stevens invited to burn the author. This widespread embarrassment does not spare the Nobel Academy, which waits twenty-seven years to officially condemn the fatwa on March 24, 2016.
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