Yesterday, a young man called Hadi Matar was convicted of federal terrorism charges in the United States. He refused to testify in his own defence. The conviction, in a sense, matters little in real terms. His life is effectively over, since he was already serving 25 years for attempted murder in relation to the same action which caused this additional conviction, for which a life sentence is expected.
What did Matar do to attract two heavy sentences? He got up on stage at an amphitheatre where the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was speaking and attempted to stab him to death, back in 2022. The frenzied assault left Rushdie blind in one eye and very close to death for some time. Thankfully, Rushdie has recovered and is still writing. He now looks like a venerable old pirate.
In this latest prosecution, Matar was accused of terrorism because his murder attempt was alleged to have been inspired by the fatwah placed upon Rushdie in 1988 for the sin of having written his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which features magical realist scenes in a dream sequence of a very human prophet Mahound who knowingly transcribes demonically inspired verses into his holy text.
That fatwah was placed on Rushdie by the late Ayatollah Khomenei, the theocratic Shi’ite leader who overthrew the Shah and initiated a theocratic Islamist state in Iran in 1979, a state which persists to this day and is, at the time of writing, currently at war with America and Israel. This context among other animosities informs why Hatar faced the additional terror charges.
Rushdie, one may recall, was forced into hiding in 1988 and was on the run for years, under the assumed name of Joseph Anton, itself the title of his memoir of that period of being hunted. This was especially heartbreaking for me at the time, as a young man whose writing had been encouraged by Rushdie, who had offered to show anything I wrote to his own agent. I’ve felt a gratitude and bond to the man ever since.
But when Khomenei died, the Iranian regime distanced itself from the fatwah and Rushdie slowly returned to public life. At the time of the attack, he had been himself again for two decades.
Rushdie had assumed a level of resumed normality which was not shared by some of Khomenei’s more rabid apostles, however. Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have been the route by which Matar, a Lebanese ethnic of American birth, was radicalised in this regard. Matar thus threw his life away in the pursuit of Rushdie’s in an attempt to demonstrate his own fidelity to the hatred of Khomenei.
But it’s worth remembering that back in 1983, Salman Rushdie published his third novel, ‘Shame’, about Pakistan. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, which he had already won with ‘Midnight’s Children’ two years before.
But ‘Shame’, in Persian translation, also won a special foreign literature award granted by a jury appointed by the Islamic government of Iran, the same government who then issued a fatwah on his life after he published his next novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.
We often forget that to hate is very close to love. Before the Islamists of Tehran hated Rushdie, they first loved him. Perhaps the day will come when they can learn to love him again.
Matar has many decades ahead of himself in prison now to ponder his violent actions, his destructive and twisted version of faith, and his own life choices. He could do worse than read the books of the man he tried to destroy.