In our conversations and emails, his determination to not let the fatwa define him has been evident
That Salman Rushdie was nearly murdered at an event in New York while talking about whether the United States was a safe haven for exiled writers is an irony he’d have rejected as too far-fetched in even his most fantastical novels. That he was talking at all at such an event – with no personal security, no special precautions – will have been a shock to many, given that he will always be best known, to his chagrin, not for something he did, but for something that was done to him, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him in 1989.
But even then, when the threats against him seemed to be at the most heated, he refused to be cowed, always looking straight ahead when he walked slowly from his hiding places to his security detail’s car, never bowing his head, never scuttling. If you succumb to the fear, he writes in Joseph Anton, his memoir of that period, “you will be its creature for ever, its prisoner”.
Hadley Freeman is a Guardian columnist and features writer
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