The Rushdie trial reminds us that Iran is not to be trifled with and is not open to negotiation

“I tried to run away, but he was on top of me and kept hitting me,” Salman Rushdie told the federal court in Buffalo. “I could feel the pain and I shouted: ‘What’s happened to my eye?’ It was a huge pool of blood.” He lost his eye, and it took seven months of physiotherapy before Rushdie could use one of his hands again. He can no longer drive, and his injuries have made it difficult for him to write. Timothy C. Lynch, the federal prosecutor, asked Rushdie to remove the glasses he has been wearing since the day of the attack. One lens is clear, the other dark, covering the eye that was stabbed. “As you can see, there’s nothing there now,” said Rushdie, pointing to it. On Valentine’s Day thirty-seven years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader and founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, sentenced a writer to death for writing a novel. Tehran ordered Rushdie’s assassination following the publication of The Satanic Verses. After years in hiding in Britain, Salman Rushdie resumed a more or less normal life, making public appearances and no longer requiring an armed escort. That sense of normality was shattered on 12 August 2022, when an American of Lebanese origin, Hadi Matar, rushed onto a stage in New York State, where Rushdie was giving a speech, and stabbed him fifteen times. The attack left the writer blind in one eye, with damaged nerves and scars all over his body.

Rushdie, aged 79, had already given evidence last year regarding the attack during Matar’s trial on state charges in Mayville, where the terrorist was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment for attempted murder. He is now on trial for federal offences: “Matar did not merely attempt to kill Rushdie; he acted under the direction of Hezbollah and on behalf of the Iranian fatwa”. However, in April, a panel of judges ruled that Akayed Ullah, who detonated a bomb inside a New York subway station, “did not provide support to terrorists through his attack”, despite having read ISIS propaganda material and told the police he had acted “on behalf of the Islamic State”. Judge Myrna Pérez ruled that the prosecution had failed to prove that Ullah had acted on the orders of terrorists. Legal experts fear that the ruling, against which the Department of Justice has lodged an appeal, could hamper other terrorism cases, including that of Matar.

These include Matar’s trips to southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah runs training camps. At the time of his arrest, Matar was carrying a forged New Jersey driving licence in the name of ‘Imad Mugniyah’, the Hezbollah terrorist planner killed by Israel in Syria. In the months leading up to the attack, Matar put together propaganda videos with titles such as ‘Fatwa against Rushdie 1.6’. ‘If Muslims had killed Rushdie,’ Matar had written, ‘there would have been no cartoons of the Prophet.’ According to the federal prosecution, Matar had also planned the attack with an individual in Iran. In May 2022, Matar wrote to him saying he knew “where to find Rushdie”, but that “the problem is how to do it”. According to the prosecution, Matar then asked the individual, named Kamyar, whether Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie was still valid. After the Iranian confirmed the fatwa’s validity, Matar attempted to kill Rushdie. “He wanted everyone to know that he was doing this in the service of Hezbollah,” said prosecutor Lynch. “He wanted to do it so that he would be seen as an Islamic martyr.”

Two months ago, it was Tehran’s former Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, who once again threatened Rushdie on the regime’s television. “Those two, Trump and Netanyahu, must be put on trial, and the execution of the verdict entrusted to Muslims across the world, just as the fatwa against the crime committed by Rushdie, who has been condemned as an apostate.” The late Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said that if anyone had carried out the Iranian fatwa, European newspapers would not have dared to publish a cartoon of Muhammad in 2006. In court, Matar’s lawyer questioned Rushdie about the content of "The Satanic Verses" and asked him whether he should have foreseen the reaction the book would provoke amongst Islamic extremists. It is the same question still being asked in certain government offices and newsrooms: we shouldn’t have provoked them.