“The blows that split the flesh of Salman Rushdie hit a free man”, writes Roberto Saviano, the day after the attack on the American-British writer of Indian origin. On August 12, Rushdie was in Chautauqua, New York, for a conference, when he was repeatedly attacked and stabbed. He was immediately hospitalized and placed on life support. “The news is not good”, his agent said.
Under the influence of a fatwa for more than thirty years for having written The Satanic Verses, “Salman was aware that such an event could take place”, pursues Roberto Saviano in the Corriere della Sera. After Ayatollah Khomeini, accusing him of blasphemy, called for his murder in 1989, “He had literally disappeared. He had shut himself up in a bubble of total protection, constantly changing addresses and living surrounded by police and armored vehicles. But after a few years, he had decided to find a free life again. And that’s what he did, hails the Italian writer and journalist, who himself has lived under strict police protection since the publication of his investigation into the Neapolitan mafia, Gomorrah :
“Salman fell in love, he married more than once, and went to all the literary festivals possible. He chose not to let his enemies force him to live hidden, watched, over-secured.”
Rushdie’s Triumph
In addition to the courage to recover a freer life, Saviano also salutes the choice of the American-British writer not to feel assigned to the same theme, not to “write only what was expected of him”, but to produce diverse stories, by their times, their settings and their themes.
“When I learned that he had been stabbed, I did not think, like many others, that Salman had been wrong to live without a police escort, and that if he had been protected, the attack would not ‘would not have taken place’, concluded Saviano.
“I thought, on the contrary, of his courage to live fully: basically, the wound of this blade weighs only a few moments compared to the years of life that he managed to escape from the threat of fanaticism and the condemnation of bigots. Salman has already won, his fanatical love of life has pushed back the deadly fanaticism that wanted to force him to live recluse, cautious, and discreetly equal to himself. Whatever happens, his triumph is there.”