Taking Responsibility: On Salman Rushdie’s Attack in New York

Iranian Foreign Ministry comment, that only “Salman Rushdie and his supporters” were to be Indicted for the horrific knife attack on the writer in New York State last weekThe clerical take on the Rushdie case is another iteration of the establishment’s famous regressive position. 1989 fatwa against Rushdieissued by the then Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini, because he believed that the author The Satanic Verses Blasphemy was, has already wreaked havoc around the world. This was a rare instance when the leader of a country issued an extra-territorial death sentence against a writer who was living in another country by imposing his pan-Islamic beliefs and clerical authority. Dozens were killed in the riots. The translators and publishers of the book were attacked. This kept Rushdie underground for years. Thirty-three years later, Rushdie was attacked by a 24-year-old US citizen of Lebanese origin, whose social media accounts are reportedly filled with pro-Khomeini and pro-Iranian content. Iran has denied any role. Surprisingly, Iran could not even issue a statement condemning the attack and the attacker. Worse, pro-state media in Iran praised the “courageous and duty-conscious man who attacked the apostate and corrupted Salman Rushdie in New York”.

In the past the government of Iran had stayed away from Khomeini fatwa, In 1998, Kamal Kharazi, Foreign Minister in the government of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, announced in New York that Iran would not attempt to kill Rushdie. As it was commonly interpreted as an informal repeal fatwaBritain normalized relations with the Islamic Republic. But after Khatami’s two terms ended in 2005, hardliners tightened their grip on Iranian institutions. In the same year, Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated Khomeini’s position – that Rushdie was “an apostate whose murder would be authorized by Islam”. In 2019, the Ayatollah’s Twitter account was briefly suspended after he said fatwa The order apparently made matters worse for Rushdie, but it didn’t stop him from writing. He wrote some of his best novels and essays during this period, contradicting, as Christopher Hitchens put it, “Orwell’s fine but misleading theory that ‘the imagination, like some wild animals, will not breed in captivity'”. . Rushdie continued to live under the Ayatollah’s sword, but he remained an advocate of the freedoms he believed in, something that his bloodline desperately never managed to reconcile with. Iran may not have had a direct role in the attack. but as fatwa This harmless man who has been victimized for more than three decades by the words issued by the leader of his revolution, Iran has a moral responsibility, at least now that he is recovering from serious wounds, to rescind him. fatwa and explicitly condemn the attack.