Writers, essayists and personalities from the literary world describe to the “world” the scope of the intimate and political upheaval that represents the violent aggression of the author of “Satanic Verses”.
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Some are loved ones. Others, simply, have observed for years what is going on around him, and his own resistance to the threat which has pursued him since the Fatwa launched by Ayatollah Khomeyni, February 14, 1989. All, writers, essayists, in France, in the United Kingdom, India, Turkey or the United States, tell the world the intimate upheaval as much as a political that represents for them the attack suffered by Salman Rushdie, Friday August 12, in Chautauqua (New York).
seized, worried -despite the reassuring news which, gradually, started to emerge during the weekend -they are first struck by the circumstances of the drama. “It is incredible that it happened to him at a conference on stage, because that’s where he is at his best: in front of a large audience. We then see how sharp, funny, brilliant “, Note the American novelist Gary Shteyngart, friend of the author of the Satanic verses (Bourgois, 1989)” for ten years “, he specifies.
Her current editor in France, Françoise Nyssen, Chairman of the Management Board of Acts Sud, knows that she will not forget the exact moment when she learned the news: “I was in a Bookstore, to attend a meeting between [the Ukrainian writer] Andreï Kourkov and [the translator] André Markowicz. The subject – You realize the irony – was peace, in the context of the invasion of Ukraine, of course. The meeting had just started when someone showed me the information. It became astounding, this moment, between Kourkov, this courageous man, who says his country at war, and this new atrocious, which left us in a terribly scary uncertainty. “
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But what happened? How has such an attack, directed against a man who, for years, was surrounded by massive police protection, could he occur? French journalist and essayist Lila Azam Zanganeh, based in New York, like Salman Rushdie, comments: “I saw the idea that there would have been a release of surveillance around the American press in recent times de Salman. We cited recent examples as if they were isolated cases. But that is not at all the case. In reality, he has lived very freely, for a long time. I have seen him dozens of times, at New York or London. There was no surveillance. This is what makes the attack that he suffered so atrocious and cruel. He had found his life. “
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