The first time I saw Salman Rushdie he was wearing devil’s horns and being burned at the stake. On 27th May 1989, tens of thousands of British Muslims converged on Hyde Park to wish the author of The Satanic Verses a speedy journey to hell. “In a rush to die,” read one banner with a map helpfully charting the way to a flaming pit. A nearby sign read: “We are Satan bashers.” Another simply: “Kill the bastard.” Rushdie’s demonisation was in some ways a bizarre compliment to the vividness of his fantastical imagination. In the condemned novel, Saladin Chamcha, an Indian man desperate to be the perfect Englishman, transforms to his horror into a sulphurous goatman with cloven hooves. In a typical Rushdie joke, the author himself—recognisable from his saltand-pepper beard, glasses and dandruff— appears to his other protagonist, Gibreel Farishta, as both God and the Devil. But in London that spring day, playful metaphor had turned into deadly literalism.
On Valentine’s Day that year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had published his peremptory death sentence. “The Imam has fired an arrow and it will not fail until it hits its target,” said Iran’s then prime minister and now supreme leader Ali Khamenei, a threat he confirmed as “solid and irrevocable” on Twitter in 2019. On 12th August this year, the arrow found its target. Appearing on stage at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times, suffering horrible injuries. Hearing the news, I felt the dreadful sense of a tragic destiny fulfilled; for these were further brutal blows in a slow-motion assassination begun 33 years ago. “As I watched the marchers,” Rushdie wrote at the time, “I felt them trampling on my heart.”