Rushdie’s courtroom ordeal, facing his assailant and reliving his gruesome assault, shows that the shadow of the Satanic Verses still haunts free speech.
The chilling testimony of Sir Salman Rushdie in a New York courtroom this week serves as a grim reminder of a reality too many in the West and elsewhere refuse to confront: the persistent undercurrent of violence within radical Islam. His attacker, Hadi Matar, a man seemingly animated by the same ideological fury that led Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, embodies a problem that extends far beyond a single courtroom, a single attack, or even a single book.
Matar, a dual Lebanese-U.S. citizen, allegedly acted under the influence of a terrorist group’s 2006 endorsement of the fatwa. His motivations remain ambiguous. His only audible contributions to the trial so far have been chants of ‘Free Palestine.’ If Rushdie’s enemies hoped to silence him, they failed spectacularly. Knife, his searing memoir of the attack, is a testament not just to his resilience but to the power of narrative itself. His literary sharpness, however, remains wholly intact.
Islam, unlike most major world religions, has an unparalleled history of violently punishing those who dare to critique or abandon it. The fate that nearly befell Rushdie is the same fate that countless ex-Muslims, apostates, and secular thinkers in the Islamic world suffer, often without the global outcry that Rushdie’s stature commands. From the execution of intellectuals in Iran and Saudi Arabia to the lynching of alleged blasphemers in Pakistan and Bangladesh, a pattern emerges: criticism of Islam, no matter how literary or intellectual in nature, is met with steel—whether in the form of state-backed laws or lone-wolf jihadist attacks.
Rushdie’s own work, The Satanic Verses, did not call for violence; it was, if anything, an irreverent literary examination of faith and myth-making. Yet, for merely writing fiction that offended clerical sensibilities, he was sentenced to death by a foreign theocrat, a decree that decades later still inspired a young man in New York to try to carry it out.
While some defenders of Islam argue that these acts are distortions of the faith rather than its essence, it is difficult to ignore that nearly every Muslim-majority country maintains strict blasphemy laws, some with capital punishment. And it is not just theocratic regimes – so-called ‘democracies’ like Pakistan have enshrined these barbaric codes into law, often with deadly consequences. Even in the West, where laws protect free speech, individuals like Rushdie live under the spectre of violence. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists paid with their lives. Samuel Paty, a French teacher, was beheaded for showing a caricature of Muhammad in a lesson on free expression. The pattern is undeniable.
If there was any doubt that Rushdie is a man who refuses to be defined by the violence inflicted upon him, it was dispelled in his courtroom testimony. With the same clarity that has made his prose so enduring, he recounted his survival - not with vengeance, not with bitterness, but with the calm authority of a storyteller who has, once again, found himself at the centre of history.
His wit was intact as he testified, remarking that he had no time to count the number of times he was stabbed as he was “otherwise occupied.” But the attack on him is not just an attack on one man but an assault on the principles of free expression.
The West’s response to such Islamist violence is often one of self-censorship and appeasement. Fear of being labelled ‘Islamophobic’ has led many to avoid discussing the uncomfortable truths that Rushdie’s case underscores. The attack on Rushdie was not an isolated incident but yet another grim chapter in a long, bloody history of enforcing Islamic orthodoxy with the sword. And until this culture of sanctioned violence is confronted, there will always be another Rushdie, another Charlie Hebdo, another Samuel Paty, awaiting the blade.
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