The world’s most wanted author Salman Rushdie is in no rush to die

When Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, New Jersey, made a foolhardy attempt to murder author Salman Rushdie, 75, at the Chautanqua Institution in New York two Fridays ago (where Salman was to give a lecture), the Lebanon-born man may have not had the idea that by plunging the knife into Rushdie, he was plunging one of the world’s most (in)famous writers right back into the global headlines.

In 1989, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa (death edict) against Salman Rushdie for his 1988 book ‘The Satanic Verses,’ which sections of the Islam world considered blasphemous for reasons that will not be discussed in this article (though the book is easily available, not just on Amazon but both on the streets, and a few bookshops in this town).

The book had come out on September 26, 1988, and mayhem had followed in its wake – from book banning across the Muslim world to book burnings in London to riots from Islamabad to Kashmir.

On February 14, 1989, the fatwa for the death of Salman Rushdie was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, and the author, already known in literary circles since 1981 for his masterpiece Midnight’s Children went from these middle literary weekend pages of any self-respecting newspaper to the front page of every major newspaper across the world – Guardian, Daily Mail, Telegraph, New York Times, Salzburg Zeitung, Al-Noor, Romano Osservatore, Al Abram, SA Weekly Mail, Muslim Voice, the Braford Argus, India Today, the Daily Nation – Salman Rushdie, storyteller, was now the story!

“When I first heard the story,” Rushdie has said in past interviews, “I thought I only had a day or two to live. Reality seemed to be generally elusive on that day (of the Ayatollah’s Fatwa). It was Valentine’s Day. Even the sky, I remember, was preternaturally radiant. I sleepwalked through a mid-morning interview with CBS about the death edict on me; then walked through streets (full of blood red roses on sale) for the funeral of my best friend, Bruce Chatwin, at a sombre, dusty, big-domed Greek Orthodox church “(where he wondered about his son Zafar growing up fatherless, which Salman says hurt more than the physical idea of ‘being dead.’).

On the run

Chatwin was the man who had introduced him to the Australian writer Robyn Davidson, for whom he left Zahar’s mother in 1987, before leaving her to marry the American novelist Marianne Wiggins in that eventful annus of 1988, who left him after five years, unable to cope with his ‘fugitive’s lifestyle’ – in the 1990s decade when Rushdie lived more like an el Chapo Mexican drug lord on the run from anti-Narco agencies than a renown writer trying to express the urgency of ‘now’ (or the past, as Rushdie does).

Neck, eye, abdomen, thigh – this was where Rushdie was stabbed that Friday, like the rhyme of a poem (in his book ‘Haroun and the Sea of Stories’), written in the first of his 10 years of post-fatwa hiding, before he relocated to the USA in 2000 to ‘live normally.’

But even with an eye gone, those exotic hooded lids that needed surgery to stop them totally drooping, Zafar Rushdie has been able to tell the world that his father is off the ventilator, on the road to recovery “and full of his usual feisty and defiant humour.”

Defiance seemed to have been the word during that 1980s decade that forever defined Salman Rushdie as both ‘free speech’ deity and ‘decadent’ writer degrading a world religion, this after skirmishing with the dictator General Zia over ‘Shame’ (banned in Pakistan) and ‘Midnight’s Children’ with Prime Minister of India, Mrs Indira Gandhi, who unsuccessfully sued him for libel.

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had no time for such legal niceties – he simply placed a $3 million dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head which, 33 years later, Matar, a fanatic, has tried to collect by rushing Rushdie.

But Salman is neither a saint nor Satan!

Rushdie is simply a writer – ardent, protean, comical and ironical – for example in ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh.’

Will Salman Rushie, now a septuagenarian, have to return to the subterranean world of ‘hiding’ after he leaves the hospital, so that modern versions of the old Rushdie jokes emerge: What’s got long blonde hair, huge tits and lives in an igloo in Iceland?

Salman Rushdie?

Defiant

Will he, like a Minotaur in déjà vu, rewind his life back to the 1990s so that he becomes, once more, a series of glimpses and sightings (and now in the 2020s furtive camera appearances in white-outed backgrounds) – Salman reciting the ‘poetry’ of Bob Dylan, listening to Jimi Hendrix and attempting the Twist, or eating a pizza as, with a hooded eye in piratical mode, he watches the World Cup in Qatar?

That, pardon the pun, remains to be seen.

But Salman Rushdie, who almost died for his literary work, continues defiantly existing on this earth.

Perhaps, as the acclaimed author Martin Amis puts it, Salman is caught up in a trap and travesty of his own making, and so condemned to “enact his own fictional themes of exile, ostracism, disjuncture and personal reinvention.”

But Rushdie, the formidable literally literary literal survivor, is still here with us – and in no rush to die.

Tony Mochama is the secretary general of PEN International (Kenya Chapter) which protects writers’ rights to Free Speech. [email protected]