In early 1988 Salman gave me a blue-paper-covered, uncorrected pre-publication proof copy of The Satanic Verses with a note on the front page asking what I thought of it. In the late 1980s I befriended Salman and, as a commissioning editor at Channel Four TV, commissioned him to make several programmes, including a journey to India to track the lives of people who were the real Midnight’s Children. In this contemporary world the absurdity, this cancerous shadow of the dark ages on the consciousness of an individual, is confounding.Īnd so, gentle reader, to some personal recollections. Was Matar’s attempted assassination a defiance of the word of God? No doubt he thought that even if he was apprehended for the murder and given the death sentence, he would go to heaven as a martyr, be assigned 72 virgins and have a glorious, if exhausting, after-life. Obviously, the indoctrination he had undergone in what he must believe is Islamic teaching ignores the undeniable fact that the Quran, without qualification, adopts with the nine others, the sixth commandment of Moses: “Thou Shalt not Kill!”. ![]() ![]() He even adopted a pseudonym which was a combination of the names of the leaders of Hezbollah, the Iran-supported outfit. His mother, who lives in the United States, said that he returned from the trip in a sultry and reclusive mood and seemed obsessed with the Islamic doctrines he had acquired on his trip. It is known that Matar travelled to the Iranian “controlled” area of Lebanon in 2018. There is no concrete evidence that the Iranian regime was behind this attempt on Salman’s life, though the media, supported by defence specialists, speculate that the attempted assassin was inspired by Iranian surrogates. The Iranian authorities have, since the fatwa was propagated, offered mealy-mouthed explanations for it, never openly withdrawing it - they say a fatwa is an “opinion”, not a command. ![]() Matar wasn’t born when the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his 1989 fatwa against Salman for writing The Satanic Verses. He should have been charged with “attempted assassination” - though the statutes aren’t subtle enough to make that distinction. The 24-year-old Lebanese Muslim, Hadi Matar, has been charged with the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie. The Sikhs who assassinated Indira Gandhi acted out of their conviction that they were avenging an assault on their religion. The word “assassin” itself comes from the Islamic cult of hashish-crazed killers who killed for some belief in religious purity.
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