By one of those coincidences of which history has a secret, the publication of Salman Rushdie’s account (“The Knife”, Gallimard, 2024) of the attack on him on 12 August 2022 coincides with the unprecedented attack launched against Israel on 14 April by the Islamic Republic of Iran. On the one hand, the surviving writer recounts his near-death experience of “the man in black, black clothes, black mask over his face, who came, menacing and concentrated, a real missile”. On the other, 300 drones and missiles loaded with sixty tonnes of explosives raced through the Middle Eastern night towards the Jewish state.
20 months after a 33-year-old fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, accusing him of blasphemy against Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie is back. Stronger and more alive than ever. And, good news, he has lost none of his legendary sense of humour.
On August 8, Algerian novelist Anouar Rahmani was due to take part in the debate on freedom of expression, alongside Salman Rushdie and other persecuted artists, in Chautauqua, New York. He was in the conference room when the author of “The Satanic Verses” was stabbed. In this interview, conducted the day after the attack, he confides exclusively to Screen Watch about this painful ordeal.
Like Salman Rushdie, I think that “if I were asked to give one short sentence about religion, I would say: I am against it”! Not because the problem is religious faith itself, but because “from the beginning, men have used God to justify the unjustifiable”.
Like Salman Rushdie, I consider that “freedom of expression is the whole, the whole story”, that it “is life itself”, that “without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist”.
We must always take fundamentalists at their word. The ones they say to kill. The ones they forbid others to say. Hadi Matar, the man who tried to assassinate Salman Rushdie on 12 August, was driven by the words of death. Death is the true empire of Islamism. Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, is driven by the words of life. The dagger of the American-born Lebanese fundamentalist, admirer of Khomeini and Hezbollah, was to drive his words down his throat and into all his organs.
Two hundred intellectuals and civil society activists, as well as some thirty associations, in the Maghreb and in the North African diaspora in Europe, have made public a petition denouncing the assassination attempt against Salman Rushdie, entitled ‘’We refuse to allow the crime to be committed in our name’’.
Here is the full verbatim:
“Religious radicalism radiates a kind of ‘glamour’. Give a Kalashnikov and a black uniform to a penniless, jobless youth and suddenly you empower the one who feels vulnerable and disadvantaged.” These words are from the writer Salman Rushdie, who is between life and death at the time of writing. They reflect the immense insight this man has into his contemporaries. Threatened with death for more than 30 years, Salman Rushdie has built his work on the burning embers of an end that he did not imagine was impossible at the hand of Man.
In September 1988, Jean-Claude Buhrer, a senior reporter for Le Monde, was travelling in India when the writer Salman Rushdie published his novel “The Satanic Verses”. “The reaction was immediate from the Shiites in India. They immediately launched a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, calling for his death,” recalls the journalist. Jean-Claude Buhrer. He immediately called his newspaper… which declined his offer of an article. Presumably, the importance of the subject escaped the attention of the famous Parisian daily newspaper.
In this interview conducted by our collaborator Martine Gozlan in February 2006, for the weekly Marianne, at the time of the release of his eighth novel “Shalimar The Clown”, the author of “The Satanic Verses” speaks of hope, creation and resistance. Vertiginous.
