New York. EFE
Writer Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed to death at a public ceremony in the US this Friday, has feared for his life since publishing the controversial book The Satanic Verses in 1988.
His work was the subject of a fatwa (religious decree) by the Islamic regime in Iran in 1989, which considered it an insult to the Koran, Muhammad and the Islamic faith.
On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced the writer and those involved in the publication of the book to death, and in 1992 a bounty was placed on his head: five million dollars. The text has also been banned in India, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.
The case against the writer attracted widespread international interest and in 1989 the International Committee for the Defense of Rushdie and his editors was formed, which included The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Le Monde and El País.
His relationship to religion changed over the years, becoming increasingly distant, and in a 2006 interview with Bill Moyers, he described himself as a “hard-lined atheist.”
other aggression
The first stabbing related to The Satanic Verses occurred in Milan in July 1991, when Ettore Capriolo, the work’s Italian translator, was stabbed to death in his apartment. Capriolo received multiple blows to the head and small gunshot wounds to the neck and chest, but survived. Less fortunate was Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, who was assassinated in Tokyo on July 12 of the same year.
Fear for his life did not paralyze Rushdie, who toured half of Europe in 1992 to mobilize public opinion and persuade governments to put pressure on the Iranian government. However, he required personal protection for all his movements.
In 1998, the Iranian government pledged to the United Nations not to call for Rushdie’s death as part of a broader deal with Britain to normalize relations.
Calls for his assassination died down over the years, but in 2016 Iran’s official agency, Fars, published that forty public media outlets had raised $600,000 to renew the fatwa and offer that reward to whoever killed him.
In 2012, the writer had to cancel his participation in the Jaipur Literature Festival (India) because allegedly two assassins tried to kill him during the celebration.
Neither going into hiding nor death threats persuaded Rushdie to give up his profession, and since he was sentenced to death he has written nearly a dozen books, including The Ground Beneath His Feet (1999), a love story and music set in Mumbai; through his memoir Joseph Anton (2012) to The Decline of Nero Golden (2017), which is set in the US political and cultural landscape from the election of Barack Obama to the rise of Donald Trump.
Despite his literary achievements, which began with the publication of Midnight’s Children in 1981, Rushdie said he would “never” receive the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy, which is responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, took until 2016 to lift the death sentence imposed on the author.
The key
Nobel. In an interview with the newspaper El Mundo in 2017, Rushdie said of the Swedish Academy: “They will never award me the Nobel Prize for fear of the Islamists.”