On August 12, 2022, a 24-year-old California-born Islamist named Hadi Matar rushed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York where novelist Salman Rushdie was about to speak, stabbing Rushdie ten times, in the chest, neck, stomach, thigh and eye, leaving the author gasping in a pool of blood onstage before the attacker was subdued. Now Matar stands accused of attempted second-degree murder and, if convicted, could spend the next 25 years in the clink. Rushdie survived but was permanently blinded in his right eye and lost use of his right hand.

Iranian media gloried in the attack though denied any involvement. We know Matar visited Lebanon in 2018, where Iran has a large presence, and his family reported that he seemed to have changed after the trip. He is known to have been an admirer of Khomeini, and was vocally anti-Rushdie in online fora. Matar claims he had read only two pages of The Satanic Verses before deciding to mount the attack on its author. He also said he was surprised Rushdie survived the attack, making it clear, in my view, that Matar’s intent was to kill Rushdie. Which begs the question why he wasn’t charged with first-degree murder instead of second. But that’s New York for you. (READ MORE from Erik Lewis: Anne Rice: The Good Witch Cancelled)

Matar’s trial begins on January 8 in Chautauqua and, whatever its outcome, will have reverberations far beyond the courtroom. The Rushdie Affair gallops on.

The Rushdie Fatwa

In 1988, the young, award-winning novelist from India named Salman Rushdie, a British citizen since his teens, published a novel called The Satanic Verses whose parallel stories and uses of “magical realism” reimagined, and at times, satirized, the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Iran’s Supreme Leader was not amused. He claimed Rushdie’s novel had been the brainchild of Jews trying to discredit Islam and, on Valentine’s Day 1989, put out a fatwa, or death order, on its author and publishers for blasphemy against Islam. A $6 million bounty was offered to any Muslim who would do the deed. Ironically, Khomeini’s son claims his old man never read the book. Rushdie went into hiding and was given police protection by the British government. He would continue to live in full or partial subterfuge for the better part of the next twenty years.

The Satanic Verses took on a life of its own, its reputation and sales only buoyed by Khomeini’s making it an Official Book Club Selection. There were anti-Rushdie riots in India and Pakistan. People were killed. The book was banned in more than a dozen countries, including in Rushdie’s homeland of India, and burned in his adopted one, Britain, where Muslims railed against their fellow Brit who dared use his right of free expression to blaspheme. Some called for his Snuffing Out while Khomeini’s minions claimed that the kill order and bounty were themselves “free speech.”

In Muslim countries, Rushdie’s novel was used as a rallying cry against so-called Western “racism,” even though the Indian-born Rushdie was neither white nor Western, and used as a diversionary tactic by unpopular, unelected regimes in countries where free speech rights do not exist, and where — I have to say it — literary matters are generally not a major concern of most people. A report from the American writer Paul Bowles, then in his 70s and living in Morocco, reveals how the Rushdie Affair was being exploited in the Caliphate.

On February 25, 1989, Bowles reports that his Moroccan driver angrily informed him that Rushdie’s evil novel had arrived for him at the Tangier post office:

He came out to the car where I was waiting and in great excitement began to upbraid me. “A book that is killing people all over the world, and you want it” … I got out of the car and went into the building, where I saw them all fixing me with baleful stares. One of the employees came to me and explained. “You have a book here that’s forbidden.” I asked him if I could see it, but he said it had already been repacked, and no one could see it. “Can’t you show me the parcel so I’ll know where it came from?” He went behind a counter and held up a package in the dark by its string, not wanting to touch it with his hands. By this time I’d guessed that the book was the one that was making all the trouble, thanks to the dictator of Iran. Still I had no idea who had sent it.

Another official came up frowning. “‘This is contraband goods. You cannot have it.’ ‘I don’t want it,’” Bowles shot back, and walked out. The next day, Bowles wrote: “Today at the post office the clerks wanted to know if the police had been to see me. I said they had not. ‘They came here and wanted your name and address, and they took away the book to deliver it to the government in Rabat.’” Such is the way books are treated in a dictatorship — as something forbidden, talismanic, dangerous, deadly. Because they are. (READ MORE: Canceling Philip Roth … And His Biographer)

While Rushdie had police protection, the personal cost to him would be high. There were several foiled attempts on his life. Threatening letters and phone calls haunted his circle. Strangers showed up at his door and tracked his every move. Bookstores and libraries that carried his book were threatened. Appearances and readings were cancelled. Flying commercially became impossible as airlines banned him from flying, including some American ones. He could not leave the house or go anywhere, do anything, without his protectors first scoping it out, a situation he quickly tired of. While they hadn’t yet succeeded in assassinating Rushdie, his pursuers had succeeded in taking away his freedom. His life, much as he wanted it, would never be normal again, nor those of his publishers. Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tokyo. A few days earlier his Italian translator was stabbed and badly injured at his apartment in Milan, but survived. Rushdie’s Norwegian translator was shot several times outside his home and nearly died.

In Britain, reactions to Rushdie’s plight were mixed. The Archbishop of Canterbury, a Mr. Carey, sided with the Islamists, declaring Rushdie’s novel to be “an outrageous slur” against the Prophet Mohammed,” and held that Muslim rage was understandable. Margaret Thatcher, whose government had given Rushdie full-time security, kept her distance, while stateside, the administration of George H.W. Bush lifted not a finger of support to aid the embattled writer. President Clinton would eventually host Rushdie at the White House, but refused to be photographed with him, as would British PM John Major when he hosted Rushdie after Thatcher’s exit. A Tory politician, giving a speech at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, where I would later get a Masters in Middle East Studies with a dissertation on Gaddafi, publicly blamed Rushdie for his extant troubles and ordered him to shut up, to the delight of Iranian dignitaries in attendance. An editorial ran in the Daily Mail that suggested Rushdie return to his homeland and spare Britain the trouble and expense of his presence. In his memoirs, Rushdie looked back on this event, saying, “If any other Indian immigrant to Britain had been told to go back to where he came from it would be called racism, but it was apparently permissible to speak of this particular immigrant any way one chose.”

Among the literati, writers like Harold Pinter, Ian McEwan, Paul Auster, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and others, held firm for Rushdie. More than a hundred Arabo-Islamic writers made public statements of support. This included Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who would himself be stabbed in the neck by an Islamist in 1994 for his “blasphemous” writings, and survive. Norman Mailer, never one to give up a fight, suggested a fatwa be put out on Khomeini.

Rushdie’s most vicious literary critic would turn out to be spy novelist John le Carré.

“He insulted a great religion,” le Carré wrote in The Guardian. “There is no law in life or nature that says great religions can be insulted with impunity.”

In one sense, he was right. There is no First Amendment in England. Free speech is a tradition there, but not a guaranteed right. That’s the problem with not having rights written down. Eventually some John le Carré will come along and remind you that nowhere is it written that you have such a right, and you’ll be thrown in the dungeon.

Rushie’s reply to le Carré was succinct: “I happen not to feel that priests and mullahs, let alone bombers and assassins, are the best people to set the limits of what it is possible to think.”

Things would not get better anytime soon. In his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton, a dark chronicle of the fatwa years, Rushdie recounts how British politicians attempted to earn Brownie points with Muslim voters by proposing to revivify an old blasphemy law that would have made it a criminal offense to blaspheme religion — any religion. A most incredible proposition to be made by a Western government, and one which Rushdie & Friends fought hard against. Rushdie recalls comedian Rowan Atkinson going to Whitehall in protest and asking what would happen under the proposed new law, were he, as a comedian, to even lightly satirize, say, the Ayatollah of Iran? (I’m paraphrasing.) Would such comedy be acceptable under the new law, Atkinson asks a panel of government bigwigs who favor the proposal. Oh, yes, they say, we love comedy! But how can I be sure of that, Atkinson says. To which they respond, “You’d just submit the script to a government department for approval.” Atkinson replies in his famously wry way, “Why do I not find that reassuring?” (READ MORE: Anne Rice: The Good Witch Cancelled)

The proposed law failed by one vote. That is how close Britain under Tony Blair came to throwing Western civilization under the bus.

The Honorable 

The 2007 announcement by Buckingham Palace that Rushdie would be knighted by the Queen for Services to Literature did nothing to quell the fires of Rushdie Hate. The decision drew protests in the U.K., and in several Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan and Iran summoned their U.K. ambassadors to protest the decision. The Iranian Speaker of Parliament went on television and promised that the bestowed honor guaranteed that violence that could be expected from “the Muslims of the world. A prominent cleric in Tehran openly said during Friday prayers that Khomeini’s fatwa against the blasphemer Rushdie was still on. In Malaysia and Pakistan, Rushdie was burnt in effigy, and the Pakistani Parliament unanimously passed a resolution demanding the knighthood be rescinded. Pakistan’s Religious Affairs minister made a speech in his country’s Parliament saying the knighthood decision could be grounds for suicide bombings inside Britain, statements for which he was rebuked by Benazir Bhutto, who said that calling for a foreigner to be murdered was not just wrong: it hurt the world’s image of both Pakistan and Islam. Six months later, Bhutto herself, long despised by Islamic fundamentalists in her homeland for her secularist, pro-democracy and pro-American positions, would be assassinated by radical elements.

In Britain, protesters gathered outside Regent’s Park, chanting “Death to Rushdie! Death to the Queen!” and held signs saying, “Rushdie should be punished.” But the government did not backtrack, showing laudable courage just two years after homegrown suicide bombers had attacked London. Rushdie was ennobled with the Queen’s Honor. The investiture ceremony went unannounced due to security concerns. Salman Rushdie was now Sir Salman Rushdie.

Land of the Free

In 2016, Iran suddenly increased the kill bounty, making clear it had no intention of giving up on getting Rushdie. A statement issued by Iran’s Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, Mr. Abbas Salehi, set the tone: “Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out.” The announcement prompted Sweden’s Nobel Prize Committee to finally make a public statement of support for Rushdie, after all these years, affirming that the fatwa was wrong and that the right of free expression is inviolable. A welcome, if belated, realization on the part of the Swedes.

By now, Rushdie was living in the United States, beneath whose spacious skies he had more freedom to move, to create, and to be. He began going out in public again, without security, and lived a more or less normal life in New York, that city of great writers. Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton ends with him giving a goodbye party in London for his personal protection officers with whom he had existed, in whole or in part, for some thirteen years (1989-2002). A premature celebration, but one altogether necessary for a man who hated living with bodyguards, and the limitations it — they — placed on him. 

The end in sight, Rushdie strikes a dolorous chord: “He chose to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights and ethics and freedoms, and to stand against the fallacies of relativism that were at the heart of the invective of the armies of the religious (we hate you because we aren’t like you) and of their fellow travelers in the West, too, many of whom, disappointingly, were on the left.” (READ MORE: La Dolce Vita: The Moral Dichotomy of the Middle Class)

Enter that fateful, nearly fatal, day in Chautauqua in August 2022, when Rushdie took the stage to speak to a packed house at the Chautauqua Institution, a venue with no visible security, and no bag checks for attendees.

The reaction to Rushdie’s knifing was one of shock, if not surprise, and revealed how uncomfortable people are these days to be thought defending an “Islamophobic” NVNP (Not Very Nice Person) and PB (Possible Bigot). The clumsy news reports from major media made clear the kids in the newsroom had no idea who Salman Rushdie was, or of the historical context — The Satanic Verses, the ’89 fatwa and the decades-long feud with Islam, Inc. Only a handful of prominent writers and celebrities issued any kind of statement of support, and those that did offered statements that were, for the most part, of the thoughts and prayers variation. Even the normally loquacious Stephen King could only bring himself to tweet, “I hope Salman Rushdie is okay,” and “What kind of asshat stabs a writer, anyway? Fucker!”

We know very well what kind, Mr. King, but who dares say it in the current lynch-mob environment? Who wants to be canceled, their lives and livelihoods ruined, or worse? These are the consequences now for defending freedom. 

J.K. Rowling, herself having recently been banished from Nice Personland for daring to say she thought gender was a fact, put out a fuller, more heartfelt statement wishing Rushdie well. She received death threats. 

Perhaps the best, most intelligent statement came from Rushdie’s old pal Ian McEwan: “This appalling attack on my dear friend Salman represents an assault on freedom of thought and speech. These are the freedoms that underpin all our rights and liberties.” Writing for the Sunday Times the week after the attack, McEwan warned that an anti-freedom spirit is growing and quickly spreading, even in the free nations, and called on the West to stop playing pussy about its core values and freedoms. He wrote:

Sometimes it seems that the world has forgotten how to disagree without resorting to a weapon or, in the mildest of cases, cultural suppression … The fatwa of 1989 appeared as a last desperate attack on modernity and its secular self-confidence. Now that the illiberal spirit is gathering its full strength, the attempt on Salman Rushdie’s life seems sickeningly in keeping with our times. Our defense of the open society has to be even more forceful.

Well said.

So how did we get here? 

Rushdie himself, writing years before the attack, may have provided an answer: “Respect for Islam,” he states in his memoir, “which was fear of Islamist violence cloaked in Tartuffe-like hypocrisy, gained legitimacy in the West …. the cancer of cultural relativism had begun to eat away at the rich multicultures of the modern world.”

His late friend Christopher Hitchens, an even more indefatigable defender of liberty, who quit the U.K., moved to the states and became an American citizen, went further, writing in his 2010 memoir that multiculturalism was being used as “one of the disguises for a uniculturalism” —  emphasis his — “based on moral relativism and moral blackmail … whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as ‘white’ and ‘oppressive.’” The same Enlightenment philosophy in which the American Founders, and Founding, were steeped, and which gave us the U.S. Constitution, the most liberal document in the history of humankind, whose Bill of Rights engraved in marble for all time that certain human freedoms were fundamental and non-negotiable, most of all the right of free speech and expression. That today’s left and their Islamist allies find such a right offensive is as telling as it is disturbing. (READ MORE: UK Criminalizing Speech Through Culture, Media, and Sport)

Though Rushdie’s attacker failed in ending his life on that fateful day in Chautauqua last year, he did come the closest of anyone yet to fulfilling Khomeini’s orders set out in 1989. Matar’s upcoming trial shows what’s at stake in these strange times, and offers an opportunity to reaffirm one of our nation’s core beliefs and founding principles: that any work of art may be created under our First Amendment, no matter how offensive, and no one has the right to physically harm the artist who created it, whatever their feelings or motivations. A good stiff sentence for Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin will make these points very well.