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Last week, in Chautauqua, N.Y., author Salman Rushdie was about to give a lecture when he was attacked by a man who stabbed him repeatedly with a knife.
Rushdie was taken off a ventilator Saturday, and was able to talk and joke, according to a friend. His agent later said the author was on the long road to recovery. Rushdie’s accused attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairview, N.J., pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault.
Born in India to a Muslim family in 1947, Rushdie was forced into exile after the publication of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988. The book was seen as blasphemous by many Muslims because of its fictional depiction of the prophet Mohammed.
The then-supreme leader of Iran issued a fatwa, a religious decree, calling for the author’s death. Rushdie, who was living in Britain at the time, was placed under police protection and went into hiding. He has lived in the U.S. since 2000.
After the fatwa, interest in the book spiked in Dallas, according to 1989 articles from The Dallas Morning News. Local bookstores hadn’t bought many copies of the book, not expecting it to sell very well. But after the unexpected publicity, they soon sold out, and began ordering more.
Patrick Murphy, then vice president for marketing at the now-defunct Taylors bookstore chain, based in Dallas, doubted whether many people who bought it would read or understand it. It’s a “difficult” book, with many allusions and a complex plot.
Reviewing the book for The News, John Sigwald lauded its “masterful” prose, but found that Rushdie belabored its opening aphorism — ”To be born again first you have to die” — in “convoluted and complex analogies involving prophets, ghosts and insecure artists.”
“Very few command language the way Salman Rushdie does in The Satanic Verses,” Sigwald proclaimed. “He mentally exhausts the reader but, far more importantly, rekindles in him a yearning for the magic lamp he dreamed about in the fantasy of his youth.”
Rushdie has made several public appearances in Dallas over the years, most recently at Moody Performance Hall in 2019 to discuss Quichotte: A Novel, a satiric comedy set in contemporary America.
Referring to the fatwa, Rushdie told The News, “one of the things I discovered about myself, which I would not have believed about myself, is that I somehow was able to deal with it, to get through it and come out the other end — and not be crazy.”