A violent and heinous aggression. Friday August 12, Salman Rushdie was stabbed several times by Hadi Matar, a young man of only 24 years old, living in New Jersey. He pounced on the 75-year-old novelist while he was on stage at a cultural center in Chautauqua, upstate New York. Since then, the writer has been in serious condition after undergoing emergency surgery. Since the 1980s, he had lived under death threats because of the publication of his famous book, The Satanic Verses.
This book, published in 1988, will then very quickly inflame the Muslim world because of certain potentially divisive passages. The most rigorous of Muslim countries, starting with Iran, consider the book as blasphemous from the point of view of Islam. At the time, Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him calling for his death. An obscure Iranian religious foundation has put a price on his head for 3.3 million dollars… Is it the lure of profit that prompted the assailant to attack the writer or purely religious reasons? For now, the young man has been arrested by the police and will be questioned about his motives.
The attack on novelist Salman Rushdie sparked outrage around the world, especially in France. The immense actress Isabelle Adjani reacted. It must be said that the star has long supported the writer. In 1989, when he had to live half hidden and under protection, she went on the stage of the Césars, when she received a new award as Best Actress for Camille Claudeland had begun to read an excerpt from satanic verses. Without saying the name of the book or the author, the actress had proclaimed her text in front of a room which respected a cathedral silence. She had then given the details only at the end. A sort of way to publicly show his support and prove that there was nothing blasphemous about it.