By Andrea Widburg(American Thinker)
In 1988, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published. In the 34 years since then, he lived under the shadow of an Iranian fatwa backed by a healthy prize purse. On Friday, Hadi Matar, a New Jersey resident, tried to make good on that fatwa, repeatedly stabbing Rushdie during the latter’s appearance in Chautauqua, New York, grievously wounding the 75-year-old author. Matar’s conduct reveals where all censorship eventually ends: with a death sentence. That’s something for Americans in 2022 to think about.
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was raised in Bombay and England. After attending Rugby and King’s College, Cambridge, and spending a short time in Pakistan, where his family had moved, Rushdie settled permanently in England. He began writing fiction in the mid-1970s and became famous with his second book, Midnight’s Children, published in 1981. He wrote several other well received novels, but it was 1988’s Satanic Verses that catapulted him to a level of fame that ended with his sustained multiple, nearly life-threatening stab wounds in a small town in upstate New York.
Rushdie’s problem was that The Satanic Verses depicted Muhammad, he of the Koran, in an irreverent light. Muslims were outraged, and several predominantly Muslim countries banned the book. Iran went a step farther. In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia fanatic who sparked the revolution bringing radical Islam to Iran, announced that the book was blasphemous and, in keeping with typical Islamic behavior, called for the author’s death by issuing a fatwa. This was backed up with a $2.5-million bounty.
The fatwa forced Rushdie to live in hiding for six years, sparked massive Muslim riots across the globe, led to bombs being planted in England, and saw an Italian translator beaten and knifed and a Japanese translator murdered. In 1998, as part of restoring dealings with the U.K., Iran’s foreign minister announced that Iran would no longer seek Rushdie’s death, nor would it encourage others to do so.
While that may have been Iran’s official position, it didn’t stop clerics from demanding Rushdie’s death, nor Iranian organizations from adding money to the bounty. By 2016, the bounty had grown to almost $4 million — although, presumably, the pleasure of murdering a blasphemer would be a sufficient reward for a devout Muslim. After all, in Pakistan, people routinely murder alleged blasphemers for free.
