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Salman Rushdie

has long

since stopped waiting for the Nobel Prize for Literature, even though Bernard Hénri-Levi insists on launching campaigns asking for it to be given to him, not just for his literary merits, but to reaffirm the values ​​of freedom of expression against the defense of religion with stabs.

The reason is the same that catapulted him to the front page of newspapers around the world in 1988: fear, threats, intolerance, terror.

Five years ago, in November 2017, Rushdie declared to EL MUNDO: "I think the Nobel Prize will never cross my path... from what we all know."

When he was

prodded

to

go

further with a "for the Islamists?"

she answered herself with a succinct "yes".

Rushdie knew that the

threat of Muslim fundamentalism

is pervasive and that if the Stockholm Academy of Sciences gave him the award, it wasn't just that he was exposed to some violent savagery.

Publishing houses that published his works, bookstores that sold his books, and even translators that offended Allah by translating them, could also be targeted.

This is not a guess.

In 1991, Japanese Arabist Hitoshi Igarasi, who had translated Rushdie's novel into that language, was

assassinated

.

More than three decades later, it is still unknown who or why he did it.

The book's Norwegian publisher, Willam Nygaard,

was shot three times

but survived, as did the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, who was repeatedly stabbed.

As usual in these cases, most of those killed were Muslims.

In the 'Sivas massacre' in Turkey, a mob leaving a mosque's Friday prayer set fire to the hotel where the editor of 'The Satanic Verses' in that country, Aziz Nesin, was staying.

37 people died, mostly Alevi intellectuals and artists, a branch of Islam.

Allah, however, saved Nesin from the flames.

He only called her into his presence two years later, and not through the intermediary of any assassin but simply by heart attack.

In his interview with EL MUNDO, Rushdie explained that, despite the fact that in 2015 the Islamic Republic of Iran had increased the reward on his head by 600,000 euros (the money, on top of that, was donated by the media), he

did not take precautions "for a long time"

.

Actually, he never took them.

In the worst years of the persecution, he literally drove the British secret service agents who protected him crazy, because he escaped surveillance to go do what he loves most: flirt.

In a twist of a Rushdie novel, the writer's assassination attempt in August was

celebrated on social media by some 'woke' feminists

, because the writer had not behaved well with his long list of ex-wives.

When Twitter was asked to suspend those accounts, the social network refused, saying that finding a stabbing of a person for writing a book funny does not violate the platform's terms of use.

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  • Islam

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