The British naturalized Indian author and his book deemed blasphemous to Muhammad. The attack on the Italian translator, the murder of the Japanese one. The millionaire bounty
Since 1989 the writer Salman Rushdie – stabbed on Friday 12 August in Chautauqua, in the state of New York – has lived under protection. The author born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1947 and trained in England, was the subject of a fatwa, a death sentence, by Ayatollah Khomeini, leader dell’Iran.
Reason for the condemnation, for blasphemy, the work of 1988 The satanic verses (The satanic verses), history fantasy in which, however, the author alluded to the figure of Mohammed. Although, after the first protests that broke out in the Muslim world, Rushdie had defined Mohammed in an article in “The Observer” as “one of the great geniuses of world history”, Khomeini pronounced the sentence on February 14, 1989 (the case then led to the break of diplomatic relations between the United Kingdom and Iran).
In August of the same year, a bomb exploded prematurely in a London hotel near Paddington station killed the bomber, Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh. It was only in 2005 that a reporter from the «Times» discovered a tombstone in a Tehran cemetery commemorating him as «first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie “.
Two years later, in July 1991, the Italian translator of VersionEttore Capriolo, he was beaten and stabbed in his Milan home. In the same month, the Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarash, was assassinated. And, again, the Norwegian publisher of the book, William Nygaard and the translator Kari Risvik were threatened. Despite being placed under protection, Nygaard was shot and wounded on 11 October 1993.
The fatwa is was reiterated by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in 2005 (and then again in 2017 and 2019 via Twitter). Rushdie says that every year on the day his sentence is promulgated, February 14, he receives a special Valentine’s Day card from Iran, reminding him that the sentence has not yet passed. On his head also a bounty of 3.3 million dollars from an Iranian religious foundation.
Born in India on June 19, 1947, Rushdie moved to London when he was 14. He attended King’s College in Cambridge. She has lived in New York since 2000. He is the author, among other things, of The children of midnight (winner of the Booker Prize in 1981), The last sigh of the Moor, The earth beneath his feet, Shalimar il clown, The enchantress of Florence e Joseph Antonfrom the reportage sul Nicaragua The smile of the jaguar and volumes of essays Imaginary homelands e Cross this lineall published in Italy by Mondadori.
August 12, 2022 (change August 12, 2022 | 22:02)
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