On February 14, 1989, while many in the West were receiving Valentine’s Day cards, author Salman Rushdie learned that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against him, and described his 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses” as “blasphemous.” That adjective was nearly all it took for Khomeini to order Rushdie’s murder, complete with a bounty of $3 million. The Iran-based 15 Khordad Foundation, which the United States has labeled as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, offered to pay that bounty to anyone worldwide who would complete the task.
Rushdie was forced to live in hiding in London for the next 10 years, under constant protection. On July 3, 1991, Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of “The Satanic Verses,” was stabbed multiple times in Milan. He survived, but nine days later, Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in his office at the University of Tsukuba in Japan. In 1993, Turkey’s Aziz Nessin, who had published excerpts of “The Satanic Verses,” survived an attack when a mob of over 1,000 Islamic fundamentalists attacked the hotel where he was speaking and set it on fire, killing more than 30 people.
In Berkeley, California, two bookstores that carried “The Satanic Verses” were bombed. In New York, The Riverdale Press was firebombed after publishing an editorial that criticized bookstores for pulling the book from their shelves. The paper also argued that everyone had a right to read the book. The attack all but destroyed The Riverdale Press office. In England, there were too many bookstore bombings to mention here.
In 2000, Rushdie moved to New York City and decided he would no longer capitulate to feeling terrorized by the Iranian regime and its henchmen abroad. The matter of being attacked by a fanatic lone wolf, however, was one that would prove much harder to dismiss.
Thirteen years after Khomeini issued that fatwa, American journalist David Remnick met with then-Iranian hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a small group of reporters at the 2012 United Nations General Assembly. Remnick asked Ahmadinejad if the fatwa against Rushdie had been rescinded. “Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice,” Remnick recalled in The New Yorker in February 2023. The Iranian president then asked Remnick, “Salman Rushdie, where is he now? There is no news of him. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.”
Thirty-three years after Khomeini ordered Muslims to assassinate Rushdie, the author arrived at the idyllic Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York State. After three decades, he had every reason to believe that he had dodged a literal bullet. The serenity of the lake bordering the Chautauqua Institution was dreamlike, but Rushdie told Remnick that a few nights before his scheduled talk, he had a nightmare in which someone, “like a gladiator,” was attacking him with “a sharp object.”
One August 12, 2022, a 24-year-old Lebanese-American man, Hadi Matar, inspired by Khomeini’s decree (though he was born nine years after it was issued), rushed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and repeatedly stabbed Rushdie, and also injured interviewer Henry Reese. Matar, who lived in New Jersey, later confessed that he had only read a few pages of “The Satanic Verses.”
For me, the heinous attack against Rushdie ran counter to the American dream itself, because America is the place where one is supposed to finally be able to escape their oppressive past.
As news broke that Rushdie had been gravely wounded, many worldwide connected the dots of religious fanaticism that spanned 33 years. For me, the heinous attack against Rushdie ran counter to the American dream itself, because America is the place where one is supposed to finally be able to escape their oppressive past. Perhaps Rushdie’s past would have caught up with him if he had stayed in Mumbai or even London, but America was supposed to be different. A lakeside event in Chautauqua, in fact, was supposed to represent the ultimate promise that in America, things are different.
And then, there was the unimaginable irony: Seconds before he was stabbed, Rushdie was set to speak about the safety and freedom that the United States offered exiled writers.
As a result of the attack, Rushdie suffered wounds to his stomach, neck, right eye, chest and thigh. In the past year, he has admitted suffering from nightmares and writer’s block. He has said that he doesn’t want to be pitied, and he doesn’t blame security personnel at the Chautauqua Institution—only Matar himself. In Iran, state-sponsored media celebrated the murder attempt.
Two months after the attack, the world learned that Rushdie had lost the use of one hand (because the nerves in his arms were cut), and he had lost use of his right eye. One of the world’s greatest authors now had use of one eye, one hand and trauma for the remainder of his life. As for his attacker, Matar spoke to the New York Post from prison shortly after the attack and expressed surprise that Rushdie was still alive. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.
Just days after Rushdie was attacked, some American writers and activists sounded alarm bells and asked if such an attack on free speech was a portent of things to come. Amazingly, they completely ignored the threat of violent Islamists and instead, made the stabbing of Salman Rushdie a partisan issue by predicting that right-wing American leaders sought the same type of silencing that Matar sought when he stabbed Rushdie, including 15 blows to his chest.
I am tempted to bet that most Americans have completely forgotten that exactly one year ago, Salman Rushdie was attacked on American soil (if they knew about the attack at all). I’m also willing to bet that most people worldwide, including Americans, still don’t know that in January 2023, a terrorist linked to The Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (a faction of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan)\ killed 84 people in a suicide bombing at a mosque in Peshawar, Pakistan, or that in May, Islamic terrorists attacked two Christian villages in Nigeria and killed 41 people, most of them women and children.
I also wonder if most Americans know that in June, terrorists linked to the Islamic State killed nearly 40 Christian students in an attack on the Lhubiriha secondary school in Mpondwe, Uganda, setting the dormitories on fire. Out of 60 students, 37 were killed. Twenty pupils were hacked to death with machetes and 17 were burned to death.
What does all of this have to do with the attack against Salman Rushdie on August 12, 2022? I believe that back in 1989, neither he, nor even Ayatollah Khomeini, could have imagined what fanaticized young males who have learned to weaponize Islam would be capable of perpetrating in the decades to come.
Khomeini is no longer alive and, in a few years, Rushdie will turn 80, but each man still remains an inspiration to millions of young followers worldwide. Whether those followers choose the path of a powerful Shiite cleric who sought to annihilate non-believers, or an exiled author who is still obsessed with free speech, is a thought that keeps me up at night. And I can’t help but wonder if a semblance of this thought keeps Salman Rushdie up late as well.
Tabby Refael is an award-winning writer, speaker and weekly columnist for The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @TabbyRefael
