“When superstition enters through the door, common sense escapes through the window,” wrote Salman Rushdie in satanic verses.
This book, which earned him in 1989 the fatwa of anathema in Iran by the voice of Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his assassination, will tear him to the grave.
Will survive? Will not survive? We will have followed in a few days with horror the news of his attack by a young American of Lebanese origin (ten stab wounds) during one of his conferences in the State of New York, then the hospitalization, the evolution of his state of health. The Indo-British writer is doing well, but risks losing an eye. His neck, his arm, his liver are in poor condition. He talks a little, jokes; trait of heroism. We can easily imagine the months, the years of physio and therapy that await him before returning to a certain physical and psychological balance. Philippe Lançon, the author of the immortal Shredknew something about it, he who went through the horrors of rehabilitation after being seriously injured during the Islamist massacre at Charlie Hebdo.
Let’s hope that the attack against Rushdie will not be just a news item decried by the greats of this world (not all) then erased in favor of a new scandal. In Iran, fundamentalists rejoice in his fate. It is he who will retain the true magic power of words.
I had interviewed him ten years ago at the Toronto Film Festival, when a film had been taken from his novel The Midnight Children. He said he was tired of coming back to this fatwa, which for a long time made him a recluse, a hunted man. Ten years of police escort. Ten years of leaks and secret hideouts. Burnings of the book, bloody demonstrations, the murder of the Japanese translator of satanic verses, fear and screams were the milestones of his journey. Then came a lull. “Only journalists ask me if my life is still in danger,” he was irritated in 2012 with a raised eyebrow. Salman Rushdie declared himself happy for a decade, finally out of this mess. Do you think… He is predicted to have other bodyguards, new retirements. He was already a symbol. Today… A bloody myth.
Since the attack, everyone has been tearing up these satanic verses in digital version. In bookstores, it’s out of stock. Will readers find his prose hard to read? Nearly 35 years after its launch, in a world where intellectual facility dominates, the work of a demanding and complex author risks leading many astray. This drift, the attack against Salman Rushdie also sadly reminds us.
This novel, a dense brick of 600 pages, does not however hold the frontal provocation. Woven with multiple intrigues on the thousand scourges of the world, it addresses, among other things, exodus and exile, racism and police violence. But in a few pages, during a dream episode, the Prophet Muhammad, under the name of Mahound, took liberties with official dogma. An imam came to devour his people. A young girl invited pilgrims to cross the Arabian Sea on foot, on the faith of a miracle. Nothing to call for holy war. The imams who shouted the loudest blasphemy had barely read the book before ringing the hallali, but the title of the novel was already causing a scandal.
Writers, journalists, artists, champions of freedom of expression, are targets around the world, in China as in Russia, in the Middle East and elsewhere. But they are not the only victims of barbarism. Sometimes people with no history are injured or killed for religious or political reasons, for their color, their gender, their sexual orientation, a sidelong glance, a territory to be subjugated by arms or because they were passing by. As for intolerance, how can it be summed up solely in Islamic excesses? On social networks, in the streets, in a torn and armed America, obscurantism and the death drive are ravaging people’s minds together.
Rushdie, an atheist writer from Muslim culture, told me in substance: the battle for the freedom to attack religion has other driving forces than the fight affecting racial crimes, since it affects the world of ideas. The fact remains that the extremism to be slain is born in many fields, straddling ideas and beliefs as well as discriminatory impulses of all kinds, health issues, Trumpian mirages, dreams of belonging. Fanaticized religion constitutes a vector of red hatred, but the motives for violent polarization have become so numerous and sometimes so futile that we will never have enough writers, even misunderstood, even bloodied, to denounce the human stupidity which flourishes everywhere. .