From the first paragraph of his autobiography (1), Salman Rushdie brings back the memory of a day in February, when his life had just changed. “How does it feel to learn that we have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” asked a BBC journalist. “It was a beautiful sunny Tuesday in London, but the question swallows up the light,” Rushdie writes. His bottom line was, “I am a dead man.”
That was nearly thirty-four years ago. On February 14, 1989, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran issued a fatwa against the writer, for his novel The Satanic Verses. Since then, three decades have passed. Three decades of magnificent literary prolixity. But also: three decades under protection, to deceive the anguish and to hope, in the end, to be out of the radars of hatred. Until this summer, on Friday August 12, a Muslim extremist attacked the writer with a knife during a conference he was giving in the United States.
A symbol of life
Since then, we have had little news. We only know that the novelist has lost the use of one eye and one hand; but he is alive. We imagine him – we hope – healing his wounds and his fears. “He kept his sense of humor intact,” his son, Zafar Rushdie, tells us on Twitter. So there are things the knives don’t reach. Recovering, he may have followed what is happening in Iran, where his torment came from, an eternity ago. In the streets of the Islamic Republic, a beautiful and courageous youth, a youth who has never known anything but the deadly gangue of the mullahs, is rising up, risking their lives. 470 dead, according to the scores of an NGO (the authorities only recognize 200). And every day, the toll gets heavier. At the end of November, we learned that a brave man named Toomaj Salehi, a rapper, figure of the revolt, had been arrested and faced the death penalty for “insult to God” and “corruption on earth”. Thirty-three years later. Words always make tyrants tremble.
Salman Rushdie is a living symbol – a surviving symbol – of the fight for freedom against obscurantism. We would have liked the attack of which he was the victim this year to have caused more ink and tears to flow. L’Express, which organized its 2022 personalities prize on Wednesday, December 7, decided to award him that of Freedom – is there anything more beautiful?
Wherever you are, Salman Rushdie, know that our admiration and gratitude are boundless.
(1) Joseph AnthonyEd. Plon, 2012.