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Salman Rushdie speaks to reporters before a literary festival in Bilbao, Spain, April 7, 2011.
Photo:
rafa rivas/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
It was a weeknight in Manhattan in 2011, and a few of us were out to dinner at a restaurant on Lexington Avenue called the National. Across the room, sitting in a banquette talking with a woman as they had their meal, was
Salman Rushdie.
The extraordinary thing about the moment was its seeming ordinariness. In 1989, Mr. Rushdie’s prospects for a long life had been widely assumed not to be auspicious. A fatwa—an edict—had been issued against the author by Iran’s
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
and a multimillion-dollar bounty had been placed on his head. He was forced into hiding, although he was said to object to that word—he felt there was really no hiding place in a situation like his.
But he eventually re-emerged into daily living, and by that night in Manhattan it should perhaps not have been surprising to see him out and about. Still, the unanticipated sight of Mr. Rushdie dining next to a large window was a piquant reminder of what he had been through, and of his resilience.
Since abandoning seclusion he had spoken publicly of his resolve, comparing it to standing up to a playground bully: “The best thing I can do is to go on being the best writer I can be and to lead as open a professional and personal life as I can. And that’s just a way of saying that there may be this danger and it’s a terrible thing and it’s an ugly thing, and we need to fight it and we need to defeat it. But we don’t have to hide under the bed.”
That attitude is what took him to Chautauqua, N.Y., to speak before an audience last Friday, where a man rushed onstage and stabbed him repeatedly, hurting him so grievously that he would be placed on a ventilator. As Mr. Rushdie, 75, lay hospitalized,
Hadi Matar
of Fairview, N.J., was charged with attempted murder and assault. He pleaded not guilty to the charges.
On that night in Manhattan in 2011, Mr. Rushdie appeared relaxed and at ease. He was one diner among many in the bustling restaurant, passing a pleasant evening. If he had any security personnel, they weren’t evident, and he wasn’t figuratively or literally looking over his shoulder. That was what was so striking—the illusory commonplaceness of it all.
After the attack on him last Friday, one detail in the news reports stood out to me. In 1989, when the death order was placed on Mr. Rushdie, he could have been forgiven for being suspicious of just about every person in the world. But the man who would stand accused of trying to kill him 33 years later had not been one of them. The police said he is 24. When Mr. Rushdie had first been forced to fear for his life, the man had not yet been born.
Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War.”
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Appeared in the August 15, 2022, print edition.
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