Salman Rushdie Oceans of intelligence and knowledge in the fields of science and philosophy separate him from Galileo Galilei and Baruch Spinoza. But religious obscurantism put him on a shelf in history where, among others, the brilliant Italian scientist and the dazzling Dutch philosopher are.
To Galileo persecuted and tortured the Inquisition for having written the “Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems”, burying the Aristotelian-Thomist astronomy that the Catholic Church supported. And Spinoza the Mahmad, the Hebrew authority of Amsterdam, was expelled from Judaism and stoned to death with a bloodcurdling curse, for having written the Ethics Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, refuting the God of the Old Testament.
Together with those giants of free thought, Rushdie deposited the ruthless fanaticism of the creator of the Persian theocracy. The executing arm of this cruelty is the lunacy of the Shiite ultra-Islamists. Luckily for the author of El Último Suspiro del Moro, a tenth of the world’s Muslims embrace Shi’ism and, in the majority Sunnism, no one would comply with a ruling by a Shi’ite spiritual leader. However, the fact that there are almost 200 million Shiites is enough to make the world a scaffold for Salman Rushdie.
A fatwa turned the novelist into the most incredible representative of the “magical realism”. This literary current initiated by the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and promoted by García Márquez, has great exponents. But none of them happened in real life what happened to the Indo-British cultist of the genre that mixes reality and fantasy.
One of the characters of The Satanic Verses he came out of the book and imprisoned him in a prison without walls or bars. And when he thought he had escaped from that nightmare because he felt that the order to assassinate him was part of a past that would not return, a rain of stab wounds reminded him that he is not free and that, although without bars or walls, he is cloistered for life.
When he woke up in a hospital bed, Salman Rushdie not only did he know that he had survived the attack. She also knew that he is still trapped in the nightmare she created for him. Khomeini. The joy of being alive must have been followed by the evidence that her life is still imprisoned in the inconceivable prison from which she thought she had come out.
There the obscure Iranian imam locked him up by dictating the fatwa that orders the faithful to assassinate the writer wherever they find him. That insane religious edict built a cell that encompasses the entire world, and from which he will never be able to escape. It so happens that, in another of the amazing consequences that his fictional novel had in reality, the second most terrible thing to happen to Rushdie since the 1989 fatwa, was the death of the ayatollah who dictated it, because those religious rulings can only be annulled by their own author. Thus, with Khomeini’s death, so did Rushdie’s only chance of extricating himself from the nightmare.
After many years living in hiding, surrounded by agents of the Scotland YardChanging residences all the time and concealing his identity, the British-Indian novelist had been acting for years as if his conviction had dissolved in time. Perhaps he began to convince himself that the 33 years that had passed had made him unknown to the new generations and that there would no longer be any fanatical Shiites willing to carry out the sentence handed down by the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
His novel proves it. joseph anton, titled with the false name that he used in his life as a fugitive and that he took from two writers that he admires with devotion: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In it he speaks of his existence on the run, as if he had remained in the past. Apparently, he believed that until a 24-year-old boy from Lebanese descent and admiration for Hezbollahwarned him with fifteen stab wounds that the nightmare continues and will continue as long as he lives.
Islamic tradition says that Muhammad erased two verses from the Koran, when he realized that the devil and not Allah had dictated them. In the novel The Satanic Verses there are characters that clearly represent protagonists of the history and mythology of Islam. One of these characters, Gibreel Farishta, represents the archangel Gabriel, and the man with whom he falls from a plane, Salahudin Chamchawala, represents the demon who, disguised as Allah, dictated two verses to Muhammad. The other central character is Mahound, a name by which the Christians of the Middle Ages contemptuously called the prophet of the Koran.
They are not the only ones. There is also a woman by the name of Aisha, who was one of Muhammad’s wives, the youngest. But the character in the novel who really offended Khomeini is the pious cleric who lived in exile and from there promoted a religious revolution against the despot who ruled in his country, and who, upon returning from exile, turned into a monster who devoured his own people.
In the actual story, Ruhollah Khomeini promoted from exile in Paris the revolution that brought down the Shah Reza Pahlavibuilding on the rubble of that despotic monarchy an equally authoritarian theocracy: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That would be the real reason for the fatwa that Khomeini justified with an alleged offense against Islam.
Rushdie always had problems with the real characters that he wrapped with fictional features in those books of exuberant fantasy. In Children of Midnight described with sharp irony Indira Gandhi. Some supporters of that Indian leader considered it a hurtful attack and threatened to punish him if he visited the country in which he was born.
In his novel Shame, the writer who studied at Cambridge and absorbed Western values such as freedom and political secularism in England reflects real characters from Pakistani history, such as Zulfikar Ali Butho and General Zia Ul-Haq. Ayatollah Khomeini He said that the outraged characters in The Satanic Verses are those of Muslim Olympus, but his fury was unleashed by the portrait in which he saw himself reflected.
That fury created the prison without walls or bars where the Indo-British exponent of magical realism. A creator of fictions whose lush imagination will never have conceived that reality would become a literary nightmare.
He had spent several years trying to normalize his life. The passage of time away from that fatwa seemed to weaken the sentence. But when he began to act as if he had freed himself from her, the fan who stabbed him to remind him of his sentence.
