It was a terrible shock when on Friday morning in Chautauqua, New York, a 24-year-old man approached Salman Rushdie and stabbed him more than 10 times on an open stage just before Rushdie was due to interview and give a lecture.
Rushdie is in mortal danger, the consequences for him are terrible, as his agent Andrew Wylie said on the night: “Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed and his liver was punctured and damaged.”
The theme of the event at the Chautauqua Institution: The USA as a home for persecuted authors from all over the world, as a place that stands for the freedom of creative expression.
Salman Rushdie has been persecuted since 1989, since Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwa following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses.
In it there is an imaginary narrative of the early history of Islam. A figure describes the life of the prophet Mohamed, plagued by nightmares. For Khomeni a serious insult to Islam, the Prophet and the Koran.
From now on he would be “an invisible man with a faceless mask” – this is how Salman Rushdie described the first feelings after the death sentence against him in his autobiography “Joseph Anton”, published ten years ago. A life under police protection followed with frequent changes of residence, with name changes and identity denials.
But Rushdie has “ripped the faceless mask” off his head again. From then on he set himself the task of fighting for his profession, his writing: for the freedom of art, of the word, of reading. His credo, taken from a Joseph Conrad novel: “But I must live before I die, right?”
The private man Rushdie had disappeared behind the political issue “Rushdie”, he explained in “Joseph Anton”, “the gap between what ‘Rushdie’ had to do and how ‘Salman’ wanted to live” had widened.
Did he at some point feel too safe as a “politician”, did he believe that nothing would happen to him? The fatwa was rescinded in 1999 by the then Iranian President Khatami, and yet fundamentalist Iranian circles have repeatedly put a “bounty” on his head. As Iran’s Deputy Culture Minister Sayyed Abbas Salehi said in 2016, “Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree that will never lose its force or fade away.”
It is astonishing that concerns about Rushdie were limited, particularly during the peak years of Islamist terror in the early and mid-1900s. But there was never any security for him, especially not after 9/11, which Rushdie processed in the novel “Rage”.
Friday’s assassination shows that it has always been a risk for him to leave the “prison” he described his life as in the 1990s and to attack religions “as a justification for oppression, spreading fear, tyranny and… committing atrocities,” as he has a character in his 2015 novel Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights put it.
The German PEN center in Darmstadt has sharply condemned the attack on the writer Salman Rushdie. “We are deeply shocked by the attack,” said Secretary General Claudia Guderian on Saturday. Her condolences go out to Rushdie and his family.
“Our good wishes and hopes for a speedy recovery accompany him.” The writer has been living “for the freedom of the word” for 30 years now under the threat of death. “There has never been such an attempt on his life before.”
It is now speculated that the 24-year-old assassin, also because he has a Muslim background, is an Islamist-motivated violent criminal. According to the police, it is a 24-year-old named Hadi Matar from Fairfield in the state of New Jersey, which is close to New York. But it could also have been a misguided Trump supporter, for example Rushdie made fun of Trump in his novel “Golden House”, or whoever.
The man who attacked writer Salman Rushdie in public is being investigated for attempted murder in the second degree and second-degree assault. This was announced on Saturday by the State Police of the State of New York. According to the police, the 24-year-old alleged perpetrator is in custody without the possibility of being released on bail. There was no further information on a motive for the crime. Second-degree murder is a separate offense in the US legal system for the death of a human being. He can be sentenced to years in prison in New York State.
Matar’s family apparently comes from a village in southern Lebanon. According to an AFP reporter in the town of Jarun, the parents are said to be divorced. The father still lives there, but he refused contact with journalists. The village chief told AFP Matar was “born and raised in the United States.”
Since 1989, Salman Rushdie has been a symbol of freedom of expression, freedom of the spoken, written word. This terrible attack on him applies to all authors in this world; it shows how endangered they are, how much risk they take when they tell the truth, point out grievances, turn against authoritarian structures.
As Salman Rushdie said after British playwright Harold Pinter died in 2008: “We will continue the work and will defend the written word and those who risk everything to tell the truth.”
The attack caused great horror in the western world. UN Secretary-General António Guterres, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, unanimously condemned the attack.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) has sharply condemned the knife attack on writer Salman Rushdie. Scholz spoke on Twitter on Saturday of a “disgusting act” and wished Rushdie a lot of strength for recovery. “The world needs people like you who are not intimidated by hate and fearlessly stand up for freedom of expression,” Scholz continued.
Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) blamed Iran for the attack on Rushdie. “For this terrible bloody deed, those who have pursued Salman Rushdie for decades and threatened him with death are also responsible,” said Faeser of “Bild am Sonntag”. She described Rushdie as a courageous “fighter for freedom of speech and freedom of art” who was never intimidated. She called the attack “a terrible crime”.
