Suspect In Salman Rushdie Stabbing Charged With Murder — Latest In History Of Attacks Against Those Involved In ‘The Satanic Verses’

Topline

A 24-year-old man from New Jersey has been charged with attempted murder after allegedly stabbing author Salman Rushdie onstage Friday, the latest act of violence on someone involved in publishing Rushdie’s 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, which provoked controversy around the world and even resulted in a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers.

Key Facts

Tangent

In September 1998, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said the Rushdie affair was “completely finished,” and days later Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said the government “dissociates itself” from any reward for Rushdie’s death, and said the official position is that the administration did not support it. However, three Iranian clerics called for followers to kill Rushdie under the fatwa soon after, and in October about 160 members of Iran’s parliament agreed Rushdie’s death decree was still valid. Since then, other groups have offered their own bounties for Rushdie’s killing.

Key Background

The book provoked deadly protests in Rushdie’s native India–where he was born to a family of non-practicing Muslims–and Pakistan. In 1989, four bombs were planted outside British bookstores operated by Penguin, which published The Satanic Verses. A number of people who helped publish international editions of the novel have been attacked. Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the book into Japanese, was found stabbed to death in 1991 at the Tokyo-area university where he taught comparative Islamic culture. The case remains unsolved, and while police said there was no concrete evidence tying Igarashi’s killing to his work on The Satanic Verses, the book’s Japanese publisher reportedly fielded death threats and Igarashi at one point used bodyguards. Just days before Igarashi was attacked, the Italian translator of the novel, Ettore Capriolo, survived a stabbing in his Milan apartment. Capriolo said his attacker described himself as Iranian and approached for him for help translating a Muslim pamphlet. Italian police could not definitively connect the stabbing to The Satanic Verses. In 1993, Islamic militants set fire to a hotel in eastern Turkey in a plot to kill author Aziz Nesin, who published an excerpt of The Satanic Verses in a Turkish newspaper. While Nesin escaped and survived, 37 others were killed. Three months later, the book’s Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot outside his home in Oslo, but survived. Charges were filed 25 years later in 2018, but Norway’s police have not specified how many or announced the names of any suspects. Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2007, which spurred more protests in Pakistan and Malaysia.

Further Reading

Author Salman Rushdie Attacked Onstage In New York (Forbes)