As I write this, I am relieved to hear that Salman Rushdie is conscious and able to speak, though still in a hospital bed. Last Friday, 12 August, he had been due to address an audience at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state when a man rushed on to the stage and stabbed the author at least ten times. Rushdie’s agent and friend Andrew Wylie has said the author is likely to lose an eye; his liver is damaged and the nerves in his arm have been severed. It is a cliché to say of someone who has been gravely injured that there is cause for optimism because “he’s a fighter” – yet if this is true of anyone it is true of Rushdie. For decades he has fought against the threat of violence with eloquence, with humour, with the optimism that pervades his extraordinary body of work.
“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” Any writer should keep these words pinned above their desk. They were spoken by Rushdie in a lecture he gave at Columbia University in 1991, a thousand days, give or take, since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued an edict known as a fatwa in February 1989 that ordered Muslims to kill Rushdie, and placed a bounty on his head. Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses fictionalises elements of the Prophet Muhammad’s life; this, according to the then ayatollah, was blasphemy, and the fatwa was the result.
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