In 1988, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was published.  In the 34 years since then, he lived under the shadow of an Iranian fatwa backed by a healthy prize purse.  On Friday, Hadi Matar, a New Jersey resident, tried to make good on that fatwa, repeatedly stabbing Rushdie during the latter's appearance in Chautauqua, New York, grievously wounding the 75-year-old author.  Matar's conduct reveals where all censorship eventually ends: with a death sentence.  That's something for Americans in 2022 to think about.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was raised in Bombay and England.  After attending Rugby and King's College, Cambridge, and spending a short time in Pakistan, where his family had moved, Rushdie settled permanently in England.  He began writing fiction in the mid-1970s and became famous with his second book, Midnight's Children, published in 1981.  He wrote several other well received novels, but it was 1988's Satanic Verses that catapulted him to a level of fame that ended with his sustained multiple, nearly life-threatening stab wounds in a small town in upstate New York.

Rushdie's problem was that The Satanic Verses depicted Muhammad, he of the Koran, in an irreverent light.  Muslims were outraged, and several predominantly Muslim countries banned the book.  Iran went a step farther.  In 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shia fanatic who sparked the revolution bringing radical Islam to Iran, announced that the book was blasphemous and, in keeping with typical Islamic behavior, called for the author's death by issuing a fatwa.  This was backed up with a $2.5-million bounty.

The fatwa forced Rushdie to live in hiding for six years, sparked massive Muslim riots across the globe, led to bombs being planted in England, and saw an Italian translator beaten and knifed and a Japanese translator murdered.  In 1998, as part of restoring dealings with the U.K., Iran's foreign minister announced that Iran would no longer seek Rushdie's death, nor would it encourage others to do so.

While that may have been Iran's official position, it didn't stop clerics from demanding Rushdie's death, nor Iranian organizations from adding money to the bounty.  By 2016, the bounty had grown to almost $4 million — although, presumably, the pleasure of murdering a blasphemer would be a sufficient reward for a devout Muslim.  After all, in Pakistan, people routinely murder alleged blasphemers for free.

Image: Sir Salman Rushdie by ChrissKockelmann.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

Still, Rushdie must have felt safe in Chautauqua, New York, a small town in the southwestern corner of the state, by Lake Erie.  The town was the home of the first Chautauqua in America, giving its name to the hugely popular adult education and social movements that swept America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  They were typical of the American drive for self-improvement.  Rushdie's appearance in the small town (before a very large audience) was entirely consistent with that movement, for he is a living symbol of intellectual uplift.

Islam, though, has no room for free speech or free thought.  Hadi Matar, whose social media show that "he is sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes," holds the Islamic view that those who express ideas that challenge the totalitarian ideology need to be killed.  Therefore, while Rushdie was speaking, Matar leaped onto the stage, stabbing the author around 15 times.

Even before the news detailing Rushdie's injuries broke, it was obvious that the attack was horrific.  Rushdie's blood was spattered across the screen behind his chair, which meant deep wounds and possible arterial lacerations.  One witness described "blood erupting."

Andrew Wylie, Rushdie's literary agent, later stated how grievously wounded Rushdie had been: "The news is not good.  Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged."  Injury to Rushdie's liver alone explains all the blood.  The liver is like a giant sponge and, when lacerated, bleeds profusely, with the flow difficult to stanch.

What happened to Rushdie is appalling, but it's to be expected when a totalitarian power encourages fanatics to police any ideas that threaten that power.  We're not there yet in America, but we are drifting closer.  For example, after the Supreme Court returned the question of abortion to the states, various leftists threatened to kill Supreme Court justices — and the Democrat party, from Biden on down, refused to criticize these statements.  That tacit approval ended with a deranged so-called "transgender" man allegedly planning to murder three conservative justices, starting with Brett Kavanaugh.

Across America, in colleges and universities and, increasingly, in high schools and below, students are being taught that words are violence and even that silence is violence.  They believe that speech that offends them justifies violent, even deadly, responses.  Likewise, exercising one's right not to speak is also a violent offense that deserves a physical response.  In other words, young Americans are being taught that the First Amendment is meaningless and that their values demand violently suppressing speech.

Rushdie has my best wishes for a safe, speedy, and complete recovery.  And America has my best wishes that this horrible attack helps us recognize that the First Amendment must be returned to primacy across the land.