The Immortal Salman Rushdie
His friends, his readers, and Salman Rushdie himself eventually stopped thinking about the fatwa. He was living an almost normal life in New York. For decades, he had had no more than a very discreet, nearly invisible security detail.
I recall the day, shortly after the French presidential election in 2017, that Emmanuel Macron invited Salman and me for coffee at the Élysée Palace in Paris. He was astonished that Salman had so little protection. “I’m not the martyr type,” Salman joked. “I’m just a writer. Why would anyone hold such a big grudge against a writer?”
Well, he was wrong. This kind of killer never lets up. You can despise them, you can push them out of your mind—the bounty hunters and lunatics that history sets on your tracks—but the pack never forgets about you.
[Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book]
And that is what my friend Salman may have grasped, in the bewildering seconds of when a man invaded the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and started stabbing him. I was reminded of the fate of those other victims of fanaticism, Samuel Paty, Father Jacques Hamel, and Daniel Pearl, when I learned that Salman’s would-be assassin had slashed at his neck. He was left fighting for his life, gravely injured, though at least now
