I won’t start with the usual preamble, driven by fear, of saying “although I disagree with the author” or “even if it is a bad book” or “despite the fact that it has little literary value”. I won’t start with any of these formulas that are repeated to us ad nauseam.
I prefer to start by saying that this is, in a word, a crime. Of an abject crime. Despicable by the inconsistency of the motive and the baseness of the act. [La tentative d’assassinat contre Salmane Rushdie] says a lot about the state of ideological degeneration that reigns in a society closed in on itself and deprived of freedoms. A society of absolute truths and monolithic discourses.
The reasons for this attempt go back to 1988, after the publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, when former Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the blood of Salman Rushdie to be shed.
Salman Rushdie has thus become the most hunted down author of modern times. And also – notable paradox – the best known. He is an important author, a follower of magical realism in his works of fiction, as evidenced by his novel The Midnight Children.
He also stood out as a postcolonial author, notably on the subject of the language of the British colonizer in post-independence India. According to him, English now belongs as much to the Indians as to the English, and constitutes a factor of unity for the Indians, beyond the linguistic diversity of the country.
He could have remained confined to the role of an academic, known only to specialists who, like me, study his academic texts, which are