I am a dead man.’ That’s what Salman Rushdie thought on February 14, 1989, the day Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa for his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses for alleged blasphemy against Islam. Rushdie was in London, and when a BBC reporter asked him how he felt knowing he’d just been sentenced to death, he said, “It doesn’t feel good,” as recounted in Joseph Anton, his 2012 memoir, alluding to the name he had adopted while going underground soon after the death decree, and also a tribute to two of his many literary inspirations.
The celebrated writer, a ‘Midnight’s Child’ (June 19, 1947), is today fighting for his life in a U.S. hospital after being stabbed several times at a literary event in New York on Friday. The attacker has been identified and is in custody, but the motive is unknown. Three decades later, does the fatwa still hold? The Index on Censorship, an organisation which promotes free expression, said the bounty on Rushdie’s head was raised to $3 million as recently as 2016. Maybe it does.
The day the fatwa was issued, Rushdie attended the funeral service of his close friend and writer Bruce Chatwin who had died of AIDS. Other writer friends gathered at the Greek Orthodox Church, like Martin Amis, hugged and told him, “We’re worried about you,” to which Rushdie replied, “I’m worried about me.” The American travel writer, Paul Theroux, called out, “Salman, next week, we’ll be back for you!” What followed was that Rushdie went into hiding for nine years, under the protection of the British government.
