WRITERS SURVIVING FATWAS: RUSHDIE ON KNIFE'S EDGE

YOU would never guess it, but there were at least seven attempts on the life of Salman Rushdie.

- KAJAL BABSU

Only one of them, having brought him to the brink of death, has been written about. The chronology of Rushdie's flight from fatwa is interesting. The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini passed the death fatwa against him in 1989. Rushdie called it his "unfunny Valentine" because it was issued on February 14. On February 18, Rushdie apologised for the "distress the publication has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam". On the 19th, Khomeini's office rejected the apology and ordered "every Muslim... to send him to hell".

Rushdie went into hiding for 10 long years, peripatetic and sandbagged by a protective police contingent. In 1998, under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian government promised to not enforce the fatwa nor rescind it-in genuflection to the technicality that a fatwa can only be withdrawn by the person who issued it, and Khomeini having died four months after issuing it. Upon his re-emergence that year, Rushdie embarked on a whirlwind of public appearances that seemed celebratory. It was nearly a quarter century later on August 12, 2022-when the world, and he, had nearly forgotten about it that the fatwa emerged from a shadowworld of proscriptions propelling the knife of a man who hadn't read more than a couple of pages of the book and had learnt his radicalism entirely on YouTube.