Two weeks before being brutally stabbed, Salman Rushdie felt that his life was taking place in a “relatively normal” register, he confessed, in an interview he gave Stern, from New York, the city where he lives. For the conversation with the German magazine, which took place in Andrew Wylie’s office, his agent near Central Park appeared alone, dressed in a gray suit. It had been many years since he had appeared without a security guard, journalist Raphael Geiger described.
At 75 years old, he seemed like a “calm” man, although he had some concerns. But, against all odds, they had nothing to do with his safety, the state of the country that took him in, the United States of America, worried him more. Not wanting to discuss the fatwa too much, he only mentioned that it was “a serious matter”, celebrating the fact that the internet did not exist at the time the Iranian regime ordered his death.
Who is Salman Rushdie, the writer who has lived for 30 years evading death threats
Since 1989, the author has had his head on a prize. It was about the publication of “Satanic Verses”, a work described as “blasphemous” by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, supreme leader of Iran and one of the main leaders of Shiite Muslims, who sentenced the author to death, promising in the fatwa issued a reward of 2.7 million euros for whoever killed him.
There were decades of death threats. Salman Rushdie only resurfaced in 1998 when Iran officially stopped supporting the fatwa the Ayatollah had issued in 1989. During those nine years, he wrote under a pseudonym: Joseph Anton. But the death threats and persecution by the most extremists continued and the prize for his murder was even raised to more than 3.2 million euros. The author of “Two years, eight months and twenty-eight days” feared nothing, the novel he wrote in 2015, following the memoir “Joseph Anton”, at this time: “I was 41 years old at the time, now I am 71 Things are fine now. We live in a world where the subject changes very fast. And this is a very old topic. Now there are many other things to fear and other people to kill.”, he considered in an interview in 2019.
The attacker who stabbed Salman Rushdie has been charged with attempted murder and second-degree assault.
On August 12, the author was stabbed 15 times before starting a speech in New York. Detained without bail, the author of the crime was Hadi Matar. Andrew Wylie, the writer’s agent, announced at midnight on Saturday August 13 that Rushdie had already undergone surgery. The writer vents and does not speak: “The news is not good”, he admitted: “Salman will probably lose an eye, the nerves in his arm have been mistreated and the liver has been stabbed and damaged”.
Source: Observadora
