British-American writer and essayist of Indian descent, Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses (1988), was attacked this Friday while preparing to hold a conference in Chautauqua County, a city in western upstate New York. The first pictures of the event that have appeared on social networks show the author on site, accompanied by helpers and authorities. His work The Satanic Verses provoked a fatwa from the Islamic regime in Iran in 1989.
An Associated Press reporter witnessed a man storming the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and began punching or stabbing Rushdie during the author’s presentation. The scribe fell to the ground and the man was immediately immobilized.
Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses has been banned in Iran since 1988 because it is considered blasphemous by many Muslims. A year later, on February 14, 1989, the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death for blasphemy. Iran’s theocratic regime also offered a reward of more than $3 million for anyone found killing the Indian-born writer with British and American citizenship.
The Iranian government has long distanced itself from Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingered. In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation increased Rushdie’s reward from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
Rushdie, an English-language writer and long-time contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, then downplayed the threat, saying there was “no evidence” people were interested in the reward. That year Rushdie published a treatise, Joseph Anton, on the fatwa.
The 75-year-old author gained international fame with the 1980 novel Children of Midnight, which won him the Booker Prize the following year, the most prestigious in the United Kingdom. The book sparked controversy in India over allegedly derogatory comments made towards the country’s then Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.
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His imaginative style has been compared to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes, among others. He himself has acknowledged his important connections to Latin American literature on numerous occasions. His latest book is titled Quixote from 2020, a reinterpretation of the work of Cervantes that the author adapts to the situation the United States was then experiencing under the administration of Donald Trump. Regarding this work, Rushdie explained in an interview with EL PAÍS: “When the four hundredth anniversary of the death of Cervantes and Shakespeare was being celebrated [2016], I reread Don Quixote and saw villains springing up in my head, which I named after the immortal characters of Cervantes. For me, this novel is a bit like Children of Midnight: a kind of compendium of everything I want to be and say as an artist.”
[Noticia en desarrollo. Habrá actualización en breve]
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