Salman Rushdie was never safe

The stabbing of Salman Rushdie sends a renewed message to the world: take Islamism – the transformation of the Islamic faith into a radical utopian ideology inspired by medieval goals – seriously.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the most consequential Islamist of the past century, personally issued the edict (often called a fatwa) condemning Rushdie to death in 1989. Khomeini, responding to the title of Rushdie’s magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses, decided it blasphemed Islam and he deserved death. Initially alarmed by this edict, Rushdie spent over 11 years in hiding protected by the British police, furtively moving from one safe house to another under a pseudonym, his life totally disrupted. 

Already during those years, however, Rushdie made several feints to convince himself that the edict was relaxing. In 1990, he disavowed elements in his book that question the Quran or challenge Islam; his opponents rightly dismissed this as deceit, but Rushdie insisted, ‘I feel a lot safer tonight than I felt yesterday.