Salman Rushdie Warns Free Expression Under Attack

Nine months after being seriously injured in a public knife attack, writer Salman Rushdie warned that freedom of expression in the West is more threatened now than he’s ever seen, according to The Times of Israel.

Speaking via video link to the British Book Awards on Monday night, Rushdie said: “We live in a moment, I think, at which freedom of expression, freedom to publish, has not in my lifetime been under such threat in the countries of the West.”

Rushdie was awarded the Freedom to Publish award at the event. Organizers said the accolade “acknowledges the determination of authors, publishers and booksellers who take a stand against intolerance, despite the ongoing threats they face.”

“Now I am sitting here in the U.S., I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he said. “The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”

Rushdie also denounced the recent phenomenon of publishers rewriting or editing works from the past to suit modern sensitivities, citing the changes that have been made to the works of children’s author Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

Rushdie said publishers should allow books “to come to us from their time and be of their time. And if that’s difficult to take, don’t read it,” he said. “Read another book.”

Rushdie, 75, was blinded in one eye and lost the use of one hand due to nerve damage after an attack on stage at a literary festival in western New York in August.

Hadi Matar, Rushdie’s alleged assailant, pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.

The attack came 33 years after then-Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader at the time, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie a few months after his novel, “The Satanic Verses,” was published. Some Muslims viewed passages about the Prophet Muhammad in the book as blasphemous.

Born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, Rushdie has lived with a bounty on his head and spent nearly a decade living in hiding under British police protection.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”