Why Would Someone Want to Stab Salman Rushdie To Death?
And what we know about the man who attacked Rushdie on stage
On the morning of August 12, 2022, while Salman Rushdie, an Indian-born British novelist, was being introduced to the audience at a literary event in western New York, a young man rushed to the stage and stabbed him in the chest and torso.
The 75-year-old author Rushdie immediately fell to the floor, bleeding heavily. It happened so quickly that the audience got stunned and started crying and screaming for help.
A few spectators raced onto the stage and a doctor in the audience helped Rushdie stop the bleeding. When the emergency services arrived, he was taken to the hospital by helicopter and put on a ventilator.
The news of this unexpected event spread in seconds and shocked the entire world. US president Joe Biden, in a statement, said that he was shocked and saddened to learn of the vicious attack. However, he appreciated Rushdie’s courage to share ideas without fear.
According to The Guardian, the author is now off-ventilator, and his road to recovery has begun. He got severe wounds in the neck, stomach, eye, chest, and thigh.
But the question that’s bothering me the most is — why would someone want to stab Salman Rushdie to death? What’s the reason?
Who is Salman Rushdie, anyway?
Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed “unquestionably the best” of the Booker Prize winners until A Brief History of Seven Killings surpassed it in 2014.
He was born in Bombay, then British India, into a Muslim family of Kashmiri descent. He is the eldest of five children. His father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a Cambridge-educated barrister, advocate in the High Court of Bombay, and later a judge. His mother, Negin Bhatt, was a teacher.
Much of Rushdie’s work has concerned the many connections, disruptions, and dispersals of the Indian subcontinent. However, many people saw him as Western imperialism and cultural hegemony symbol.
Why would someone want to stab Rusdhie?
Rushdie entered into the world of hatred and controversy with his book, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988. Why? Because it contains allegedly blasphemous content.
The novel portrays a fictionalized version of the Prophet Mohammed and misinterprets some verses of the Quran. You can read The Satanic Verses Controversy on Wikipedia for details.
The book created a storm of demonstrations from Muslim communities worldwide. Many were shocked by the fact that how Rushdie, being raised as a Muslim in Mumbai, seemed to mock Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
Muslims in the UK, Iran, India, and other places burned his books and told him to apologize for his mistakes. In many countries, the book was banned permanently. Above all, Rushdie was getting tremendous hatred and many death threats.
On 14 February 1989, Iran’s president, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (religious ruling) urging Muslims to kill the author and his publisher. He also mentioned, “If Rushdie apologizes and disowns the book, people may forgive him.”
Rushdie, himself Muslim by birth, said to Britain’s Press Association, ‘’It is not true this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I doubt very much Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or anything more than selected extracts taken out of context.’’
On 19 February 1990, Ayatollah Khomeini’s office replied the following:
“The imperialist foreign media falsely alleged that the Islamic Republic officials have said the death sentence on the author of The Satanic Verses will be retracted if he repents. Imam Khomeini has said: This is denied 100%. Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to Hell.”
Rushdie was a UK citizen at that time, and the British government responded by putting him under police protection. But the violence continued regarding the book and the controversy it created.
In 1991, the novel’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death, and an assailant attacked its Italian translator. Even the book’s Norwegian publisher got injured in a shooting in 1993.
Khomeini’s fatwa created a considerable stir all across the world. As a result, people divided themselves into two groups, and Rushdie was forced to go hiding for an extended period at one point.
Though in 1998, when Ali Khomeini succeeded Ayatullah Khomeini, the Iranian government said it would no longer enforce the fatwa, the controversy regarding The Satanic Verses continues to this day.
What we know about the man who attacked Rushdie on stage
The man who stabbed Rushdie got caught immediately.
He is a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar from Fairview, New Jersey. He was born in the United States a decade after The Satanic Verses was published. His parents emigrated from Yaroun in southern Lebanon.
Though a preliminary law enforcement review of Hadi’s social media accounts showed that he was sympathetic to Shia extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), no definitive links had been found to establish Iran’s involvement in this attack.
So the motive seems to be very unclear to the police.
A NATO counter-terrorism official from a European country said, “Close scrutiny needs to be paid to his communications. More investigation will reveal more information on the exact nature of the links.”
Hadi pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in court, but the prosecutors called it a “targeted, unprovoked, pre-planned attack.”
I wonder what led a young man to commit such a terrible crime? Is there any politics involved behind this? Or it’s just a case where a mentally disturbed man wanted some attention?
I hope soon we will be able to know the reasons why Hadi Matar committed this terrible crime.
But I firmly believe that no one should attack a person just because they don’t like what the person has written in his book.
If you disagree with someone’s ideas or writing, you should express your disagreement through rational conversation or by writing your own book on the topic — certainly not by stabbing that person in the neck.
Religious intolerance is growing not just in Muslims but in all communities all over the world. For example, if you say something against Hinduism in India, your life will be over.
We’ve seen many Muslims accused of carrying or eating beef beaten to death by Hindu mob attacks in India. Because they consider the cow a sacred animal and a source of prosperity.
Unimaginable, right?
No doubt, we are living in a ridiculously uncivilized world right now.
Sources: NYTimes, The Guardian, Independent, Al Jazeera, Wikipedia, The Indian Express, People.
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