Jackson Jambalaya

Thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced Salman Rushdie to death on Valentine’s Day for writing a novel.... 

The ayatollah died four months later, but it soon became apparent that Rushdie’s 1988 novel was no match for a few sentences read over the radio calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be” to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and anyone else who helped bring his blasphemous book into the world.... 

The fatwa’s ability to erase borders—not only between Tehran and London or New York, but between words and violence—made it a sort of spell. It was at once a death sentence, a wanted poster, a call to arms, a license to kill, a pardon before the fact, and a reward after it. At the same time that it dissolved distinctions, it reconstituted the world into Manichaean absolutes impervious to argument or appeal. When Rushdie was persuaded to make a public apology in the early days of his death sentence, the dying ayatollah fired back: “Even if Salman Rushdie becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell.” 

The Supreme Leader who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini, and ruled for 37 blood-soaked years until America and Israel took him out, made it clear on taking power that the fatwa had no fail-safe, but had been “fired like a bullet that won’t rest until it hits its target.” Like the unforgivable Rushdie and the indelible sin of his book, the fatwa was forever.... 

One of the amazing things about the fatwa was how soon it began working. Ten days after it was issued, two bookstores in Berkeley, California, where I’d been getting a PhD in English literature, were firebombed. Both had been selling The Satanic Verses. One of them, Cody’s, was a place I’d spent many hours, and though I’d moved back east by then, I felt an uncanny reverberation. A day after Cody’s blew up, a bomb scare emptied the Barnes & Noble in downtown Manhattan around the corner from the college where my father taught German literature.... 

Rushdie’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in July of 1991 outside the university in Tokyo where he taught. His Italian translator had been stabbed in Milan the week before but survived. In October of 1993, his Norwegian publisher was shot in Oslo and, though gravely wounded, survived. Aziz Nesin, a Turkish editor and intellectual who had announced his intention to translate The Satanic Verses into Turkish, narrowly escaped being burned alive in July of 1993 when his hotel in Eastern Turkey, where he was attending a conference, was torched by an angry mob after the artists, musicians, and writers inside refused to send out the 78-year-old Nesin to be killed. Thirty-seven people died in the fire; Nesin was helped down a ladder by firefighters who began beating him once they realized who he was, and someone cried, “This is the devil we really should have killed.” 

Muslims who defended the book, or failed to anathematize it, were also targeted. In Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s excellent memoir of his time in hiding, he writes that “Muslims began to be killed by other Muslims if they expressed non-bloodthirsty opinions. In Belgium, the mullah who was said to be the spiritual leader of the country’s Muslims, the Saudi national Abdullah Ahdal, and his Tunisian deputy Salim Bahri, were killed for saying that, whatever Khomeini had said for Iranian consumption, in Europe there was freedom of expression.” Both men were found shot to death by unknown assailants.... 

A mysterious feature of the fatwa was the way it brought out apologists, appeasers, and peacemakers who misunderstood its motivations. Former President Jimmy Carter blamed Rushdie in The New York Times for “vilifying the Prophet Mohammed and defaming the Holy Koran.”... 

The message Carter failed to understand was received loud and clear by a 24-year-old American named Hadi Matar. 

Thirty-three years after Rushdie was sentenced to death, Matar traveled from Fairview, New Jersey, to Chautauqua, New York, where he attacked Rushdie with a knife from behind as he sat onstage at the Chautauqua Institution waiting to give a speech about free expression and the importance of keeping writers safe. Matar, who told a reporter that he had only read “a page or two” of The Satanic Verses but knew it was an “attack on Islam,” stabbed the 75-year-old writer in the face, the eye, the neck, and the midsection, 15 times before being tackled by bystanders....  Rest of article.

The fatwah against Rushdie is still active.