Europe 1 7:20 p.m., August 13, 2022

Iranian writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a conference.

In Europe Soir, the writer and journalist Éric Naulleau returned to this attack.

He explained that "Salman Rushdie was despite himself a political issue and a geopolitical issue".

Horror struck Friday in New York.

Iranian writer Salman Rushdie was stabbed at a conference.

Currently in critical condition, he is on life support and could lose an eye.

According to the first elements of the investigation, the assailant would be called Hadi Matar, a Shiite extremist won over to the cause of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Indeed, since the

Satanic Verses

published in 1988, Salman Rushdie had become the enemy to be defeated for Iran, his country of origin.

This book read had earned a fatwa of death.

In Islam, a fatwa is a legal opinion issued by a scholar of Islamic law.

Eric Naulleau's regrets

But this fatwa, the writer and journalist Éric Naulleau never believed in it, because he thought that "no one would take action".

And yet, as he confides to Europe 1, "we never slip through the cracks of a fatwa".

However, Éric Naulleau affirms that Salman Rushdie lived with around him an "atmosphere of threat. He breathed it like others breathe oxygen", he explains, referring to this fatwa, which forced him to live under close supervision.

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"Salman Rushdie was in spite of himself a political stake"

Éric Naulleau assures that "Salman Rushdie was despite himself a political issue and a geopolitical issue, that is to say that it was enough to mention his name to revive anti-Western hatred and to stir up the war between Shiites and Sunnis" and even goes further by alleging that he "had become a symbol of an enemy of Islam, which he never was".

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"Islam through Islamism which is the main danger"

For the writer, this attack revives the question of obscurantism which "struck with Salman Rushdie, which struck us at the Bataclan, with Charlie (Hebdo), through Samuel Paty...".

But Éric Naulleau wants us to have the courage to say things and to talk about "the danger of Islam through Islamism, which is the main danger".