From wikipedia.com / © ActuaLitté
During the fortnight since August 12th, when author Salman Rushdie was attacked and seriously injured before he was due to give a lecture in Chautaugua, New York, I’ve been trying to write something here about the incident. But to be honest, I can’t express my reaction any more succinctly than Stephen King did when he tweeted a day afterwards: “What kind of asshat stabs a writer, anyway? F*cker!”
The asshat and f*cker in question, a 24-year-old called Hadi Matar, was inspired by the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, and reaffirmed in 2017 by Khomeini’s successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Rushdie, of course, received the fatwa on account of his supposedly blasphemous-against-Islam novel The Satanic Verses (1988).
I have to admit that my knowledge of The Satanic Verses is limited. When I tried reading it, I found the opening section, in which the two protagonists Farishta and Chamcha are thrown from an airplane as it explodes over the English Channel, pretentious and badly written and felt disinclined to read the rest of the book. I remember Rushdie using the phrase ‘like titbits of cigar’ to describe how the two men fell from the fragmenting fuselage, and thinking to myself what a bloody horrible simile it was.
Still, I persevered with The Satanic Verses and thought the part that came next, describing Bollywood, was quite engaging. But that dodgy opening section had fatally weakened my interest in it. I was preparing to move to another country at the time and, unfinished, the book got stashed away in a box with some things I wasn’t taking with me. Neither the box nor book have been opened since. I’ve heard that the plot later on has Farishta and Chamcha transforming into an angel and a devil, which sounds intriguing, if a tad similar to what happens in Mervyn Peake’s fantasy novel Mr Pye (1953).
Still, I read 50 pages of the book, which is probably 50 pages more than 99.99% of those clamouring for Rushdie’s execution over the years have read of it. One person I met who definitely had read The Satanic Verses was the CEO of an oil company in Tunisia whom, many years later, I was hired to give English lessons to every week. As his English was already excellent, ours was hardly a teacher-student relationship and I suspect he just wanted a regular opportunity to blether with someone in English about whatever caught his fancy. In addition to being a cerebral and erudite man, he was an observant Muslim. Our lessons took place in the middle of Friday afternoons and were sometimes delayed by 10 or 15 minutes because he was slightly late getting back from Friday prayers at his mosque.
One afternoon, he wanted to talk to me about an incident at the Printemps des Art Fair in La Marsa, a few miles along the coast from Tunis. A couple of the artworks displayed there had caused a riot by hard-line Islamic Salafists, who believed them to be ‘blasphemous’, and during the protests the venue had been looted. My student was incensed by this and particularly incensed at how the Salafists had targeted a painting by the artist Mohamed Ben Slama. This featured God’s name spelt out in configurations of tiny ants which, the Salafists claimed, sacrilegiously reduced Allah to the level of puny insects that scurried about in the dirt. But in fact, my student pointed out, the Koran depicts ants as an intelligent and noble species, even in possession of their own language, and arguably the artist was trying to glorify God through the marvellous intricacies of His creations, even the smallest ones. “Those people who attacked the painting,” he snorted, “haven’t read or understood the Koran properly.”
Then, not missing a beat, he continued, “It’s like Rushdie’s book. Those people calling for him to be killed, they don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t even read The Satanic Verses. I have read it and I don’t think it’s blasphemous.”
Meanwhile, depressingly but predictably, the attack on Rushdie has been hijacked by a lot of extreme right-wing, GB News-watching, Enoch Powell-worshipping morons who are trying to peddle it as yet more evidence of the need to stand up against the woke mob. Because apparently that’s what those hideous, Guardian-reading Wokerati will do if they’re not able to cancel your right to free speech – they’ll stab you instead. Oh, and of course it provides them with another excuse to bash Muslims.
Never mind the fact that Rushdie finds their right-wing views abhorrent and indeed, in The Satanic Verses, referred to their heroine Margaret Thatcher as ‘Mrs Torture’. And never mind the fact that their right-wing counterparts in the USA are currently getting onto school boards and purging the libraries and curriculums of the schools under their jurisdiction of books they don’t approve of, usually books that have non-white or gay people as characters, touch on issues such as racism and homophobia, and generally imply that life in the USA isn’t as hunky-dory as it’s supposed to be. Those right-wing gits are as twisted and blinkered as Rushdie’s would-be assassin.
One consequence of this horribleness – I’m now planning to dig out that old copy of The Satanic Verses and give it a second try. And apparently I’m not alone in my new-found desire to read it. Reports say that, in the UK alone, sales of The Satanic Verses have surged so much that Rushdie’s publisher is currently rushing out a reprint. So, Hadi Matar, not only did you fail in your attempt to kill Rushdie, but you’ve given a huge boost to the book you detest so much (though you’ve probably never read it) and more people than ever are being exposed to its blasphemous musings. Well done.
© Viking Penguin