Dissident Spotlight: Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie didn't choose to become a dissident, but he embraced the fight whole-heartedly against a danger that has followed him into his seventies.
Salman Rushdie never asked to be a dissident writer. He didn’t set out to oppose a tyrant or advocate for a democratic movement. Instead, he rose to the occasion when someone who never read his book made a global call for his assassination.
In September 1988, Salman Rushdie published his fifth novel, The Satanic Verses. It was a funny book about being an immigrant in a globalized world. The book grappled with themes like identity and conformity. One passage was a dream that referenced the real Satanic Verses, apocryphal passages from the Quoron that the Devil spoke instead of the archangel Gabriel.
On Valentine’s Day, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwah, a global command to Muslims around the globe. He hadn’t read the book, and Rushdie had to live in hiding with help from international police organizations for almost a decade.
Until August 2022, the ordeal seemed to be over.
Radicalism Never Disappears
On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was scheduled to speak at the Chautauqua Institute in New York. He was scheduled to speak about a program that provided housing for writers fleeing persecution abroad.
As he sat to speak, a man ran onto the stage and stabbed Rushdie 14 times before being subdued by the crowd. Rushdie was rushed to the hospital and spent the next six months recovering from the worst of his injuries. He lost an eye, but continued writing.
In April 2024, Rushdie came out with his memoir about the attack, Knife. It’s an exploration of the hate that fuelled the attack, but also a meditation on the power of love. His wife, poet and novelist, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, cared for Rushdie and arranged security throughout his recovery. Rushdie tells their love story alongside his retelling of the attack, showing the power of love to triumph over hate.
One of the most interesting things about the attack on Rushdie is that it wasn’t directly related to the fatwa. His assassin wasn’t working on behalf of Khomeini, who died less than four months after issuing the fatwa. Instead, the young man was radicalized after a trip to southern Lebanon in 2018.
According to an interview the young man gave to The New York Post, he had only “read a few pages” of The Satanic Verses and only seen a few YouTube videos. The young man also objected to Rushdie’s criticisms of Islam. The New York Post also reported that he spent a lot of time on the internet “in his mother’s basement.”
An American Assassination Attempt
Rushdie has characterized his would-be assassin’s attack as “in some ways, a very American attack.” His attacker was not only radicalized after his trip to southern Lebanon. He continued to self-radicalize on YouTube. His attacker seemed more motivated by a desire to attain personal glory than serve a larger power.
Rushdie was marked as an enemy of fundamentalist Islam in 1989. That mark was enough to give license to someone — who was born after the Rushdie Affair officially ended — to kill.
In between death threats, Rushdie has become a free speech champion. He has been President of PEN International and worked on behalf of writers facing persecution. Rushdie has written 23 books and remains active as a writer.
He never asked to be a dissident writer, but Rushdie has become one of the great champions of free expression for writers and all free-thinking people.