Salman Rushdie and the struggle for free speech

The longer Salman Rushdie remained alive, he wrote in “Joseph Anton”, “the longer he went without being killed, the easier it was for people to believe that nobody was trying to kill him.” The book is a memoir of the years the author spent in hiding after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa urging Muslims to murder him and his publishers because of the alleged blasphemy of his novel, “The Satanic Verses”. That was in 1989; on August 12th Sir Salman (as he became in 2007) was stabbed as he was about to give a lecture in upstate New York.