Salman Rushdie May Lose A Damn Eye

Over a 33-year-old book.

Last night, several hours after author Salman Rushdie had been attacked and stabbed while giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, his book agent Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie told reporters "the news is not good." Rushdie is on a ventilator, expected to lose an eye, has suffered liver damage, and the nerves in his arm were severed.

Police have identified a suspect, 24-year-old Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey, whose social media accounts suggest he was sympathetic to the cause of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard. 

The fatwa against Rushdie was never officially over.

In 1989, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie over his book The Satanic Verses — declaring that all Muslims everywhere should go out and kill Rushdie for his blasphemy. The Iranian government even went so far as to put a $6 million bounty on his head.

Long story short, the main issue Khomeini had with The Satanic Verses is that the title itself (and much of the book) referred to a legend about the Prophet Mohammed — a legend that he was tricked by Satan into putting some stuff into the Koran about how it was still okay to worship a few of the old pre-Islamic goddesses here and there, but then realized what was going on and took those parts out.

Additionally, there were the following "blasphemies" supposedly contained in the book:  God being referred to as "The Destroyer of Man," criticizing Abraham for the way he treated his wife and son, having a character (who is not meant to be a good guy) refer to Muhammad as Mahoud (an old derogatory term) and insult him in a variety of ways, naming prostitutes after Muhammad's wives, having a character whose job it was to write propaganda against Muhammad insult Muhammad's friends, and generally criticizing Islam for a variety of reasons, includingperhaps being too restrictive. 

Quite notoriously, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam said on several talk shows that he supported the fatwa and was totally fine with someone going and murdering Salman Rushdie, which was a pretty freaking jarring development for Cat Stevens fans. This was a time before people regularly found out terrible things about musicians they liked (although he did write that creepy song about Patti D'Arbanville being dead despite the fact that she was not dead).

In 1998, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate reformer, announced ever so graciously that the Iranian government would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie." But this did not mean the fatwa went away . In 2006 the Iranian government reaffirmed that they still wanted him killed.

Still, it seemed like something far away, the kind of thing that only comes up in pub trivia. Cat Stevens, back on the Peace Train, started insisting around 2007 that he was only kidding when he said he supported the fatwa and people were taking his comments out of context. Rushdie, who spent several years under police protection, even started going out without any security. He was without security yesterday.

And Rushdie may now lose an eye, lose the use of his arm, and suffer damage to his liver. Because this 24-year-old followed the orders of a man who died a decade before he was even born over a book published a decade before he was born and actually tried to kill him. Matar will now likely spend a good chunk of his life, if not the whole of it, in prison — where he will not really be able to enjoy his bounty.

It is one thing for religious people to practice their own religions and hold to their own beliefs, it is another for them to force those beliefs upon others who have nothing to do with their religion and do not believe in it. That never ends well.

[ The Guardian ]

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