"My problem is that people continue to perceive me under the sole prism of the fatwa", had confided one day this free-thinker who wants to be a writer, not a symbol.
But the rise to power of radical Islam in recent years has constantly brought it back to what it has always been in the eyes of the West: the symbol of the fight against religious obscurantism and for freedom. of expression.
Already, in 2005, he considered that this fatwa was a prelude to the attacks of September 11, 2001. And, in 2016, he noted: "My case was only the precursor of a much larger phenomenon which now concerns us all ."
He had recounted in his memoirs "Josef Anton", published in 2012, the change in his life when the Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini had, on February 14, 1989, called on Muslims around the world to shoot him down, fundamentalists judging his work Blasphemous "Satanic Verses" against the Koran and Muhammad.
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Forced from then on to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache, he called himself Joseph Anton, in homage to his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
He had to face immense loneliness, further increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom "The verses..." are dedicated.
"I am gagged and imprisoned (...). I would like to play football with my son in the park. Ordinary, banal life, an inaccessible dream for me", he wrote.
But, from 1993, tired of being "an invisible man", he increased his travels and public appearances, while remaining under the surveillance of the British government.
Now based in New York, Salman Rushdie - arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard - had resumed, before the attack suffered on Friday, a more or less normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
The fatwa was not lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks or even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stab wounds in 1991.
“Thirty years have passed,” he said, however, in the fall of 2018. “Now everything is fine. I was 41 at the time (of the fatwa), I am 71 now. We live in a world where the issues of concern change very quickly. There are now many other reasons to be afraid, other people to kill..."
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His book, he has since explained, has been "greatly misunderstood".
"It was actually a novel about South Asian immigrants in London and their religion was just one aspect of that story," he said.
magical realism
Knighted in 2007 by the Queen of England, to the great displeasure of Muslim extremists, this master of magical realism, a man of immense culture who calls himself apolitical, has written in English some fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and trials.
Salman Rushdie, whose mother tongue is Urdu, was born on June 19, 1947 in India, in Bombay (or Mumbai) into a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals, wealthy, progressive and cultured.
He devours Indian epics and participates in Hindu, Muslim and Christian festivals.
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At 13, he left to study in England.
After passing through Cambridge University, he worked in Pakistan as a television producer.
Faced with permanent censorship, he returned to London, earning his living in advertising.
His first famous novel is "The Midnight Children", which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Followed by "The Shame" (1985 prize for the best foreign book in France), "The Moor's Last Smile", "The Earth Under the Feet ", "Shalimar the Clown" or "The Enchantress of Florence".
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Fictions where this lover of fantastic odysseys often talks about India and its relations with the West and denounces the lack of landmarks which, according to him, has destabilized the world for years.
Former president of the PEN American Center, a great reader of the German writer Günter Grass and the Russian Mikhail Bulgakov, Salman Rushdie has been married and divorced four times.
His last divorce dates back to 2007, with the actress and model of Indian origin Padma Lakshmi.
© 2022 AFP