This article is published with the permission of the public account "Memory Islands Isles"
Yesterday, the famous writer Salman Rushdie was attacked at a speech event in New York State.
It is said that Rushdie had just been invited to the stage by the host when a man in a black shirt suddenly jumped quickly from the audience onto the podium and quickly stabbed him with a knife, causing Rushdie to be stabbed more than ten times in the body.
The attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey, has been arrested by police. According to eyewitnesses, Matar was furious and struggled to swing his knife at Rushdie after being pulled apart.
New York State Police issued a notice that Rushdie had been taken to the hospital by helicopter. But Rushdie's agent, Wylie, said Rushdie was currently using a ventilator, with nerves in his arm cut off, a stabbed liver and possibly losing an eye.
As of the deadline, Rushdie was still in emergency rescue and was not out of danger.
Satan's Psalms
Rushdie, 75, is one of the most famous contemporary writers. His fame comes not only from his excellent literary works, but also from the 1989 execution order issued by Iranian religious leader Khomeini (Fatwā, a religious interpretation or legal advice issued by scholars or leaders in the Islamic faith, which has been used many times in the military and political field throughout history).
Despite living under assassination threat for more than three decades, with annual security costs of $1.2 million, Rushdie has never stopped speaking out and creating.
How could a novelist who ate on words get the overthrow of the Iranian king, call on the Muslim world to launch a religious revolution, and launch a hunting order with the invader Iraq in anger against the Shiite legend who had resisted for 8 years?
It all starts with a novel called The Satanic Psalms.
Rushdie, a graduate of cambridge's history department, is biased toward the left in style and political stance, and his works are often classified as magic realist literature, and the content is mostly related to the critique of conservatism and religion. The Satanic Psalms, published in September 1988, is one such work.
The story of the novel is derived from an unconfirmed rumor that the Prophet Muhammad once added verses to the Quran that recognized the divinity of the three pagan goddesses who had been worshipped in Mecca. However, the prophet later deleted these verses and claimed that the devil had tempted him to say these verses to appease the Meccans. This legend was once used by Christian missionaries as a weapon against Islam, and it is actually a forbidden area in the forbidden area of Islamic doctrine.
Rushdie's "Satanic Psalms" not only points the title directly to this forbidden news, but also spreads it through the mouth of the protagonist. More seriously, in the setting of the novel, the protagonist and the archangel Kipler (i.e. Gabriel in the Catholic Church) mistakenly share the same body. This series of wild fantasies has infuriated the entire Muslim world.
After its publication, Psalms of Satan were banned in several Muslim countries, and in February 1989, tens of thousands of protests against Rushdie and Satan in Pakistan attacked American cultural centers and ransacked american express offices, killing six protesters.
On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Khomeini, who had just led Iran out of the smoke of the Iran-Iraq War, announced the sharia order for Rashid's execution on radio in Tehran, calling the Satanic Psalms "blasphemous" and opposing Islam. Upon learning that he had been targeted by the Shariah of Executions, Rushdie made a public apology to the Muslim world, but Khomeini did not think he could be forgiven:
"Even if Salman Rushdie repents of what he has done and becomes the most devout person, every Muslim still has the responsibility to do everything in his power to send him to hell at the cost of his life and property."
As in 1988, when thousands of opposition political prisoners were executed, Khomeini's toughness and arbitrariness seemed set to cause another bloody storm. Less than four months after the decree was issued, Khomeini died of a heart attack, but the Iranian government did not come forward to cancel the execution order. Rushdie has lived a life of fear and horror ever since.
Death knocks on the door
From 1989 to 1999, it was arguably Rushdie's toughest decade. Under the protection of the police, Rushdie continued his literary career anonymously. He gave himself another name, Joseph Anton, half of the names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Tcheekhov, two of his favorite writers.
At the same time, the threat affected more people than expected. After the publication of The Satanic Psalms in the United States, the publisher Viking Penguin received letters and phone calls from Muslims protesting. In early March 1989 alone, the police received 78 reports of threats against bookstores, a fraction of the total number of threats, and london bookstores were even bombed, with newspapers defending the right to read novels and offices destroyed by incendiary bombs.
The turning point came in 1998, when the Iranian government announced that it would not carry out his death sentence, although no one was freed in the first few years. On July 3, 1991, the Italian translation was assassinated in Milan and seriously injured, and on July 11, the Japanese translation was assassinated and killed; On 2 July 1993, 37 people were killed on fire at the hotel, and in October, the Norwegian publisher survived three shootings in Oslo.
Now, more than three decades after the killing order, Islam's relationship with the global world is changing. Rushdie had appeared more and more safely in front of the public, but at this moment, the assassination shattered the silence.
Iran's conservative media cheered for this, and some Iranian scholars believe that Rushdie is a "pawn of the empire", because in the past few days, Iran's nuclear negotiations with the West are coming to an end, and next, Iran may face condemnation from the international community because of this assassination, and the situation may be further complicated.