Report: Salman Rushdie

Part 1: Who is Rushdie? What’s the background? Who ordered his assassination?

This is the first article in Autonomia’s debut series of reports about Salman Rushdie, the writer targeted for death by Iran on February 14, 1989. Rushdie was stabbed in the United States of America in an assassination attempt on August 12, 2022.

Who is Salman Rushdie?

Salman Rushdie’s a 75-year-old secular writer, author and satirist. His books are mostly fiction. Born in Bombay, India, he moved as a youth to England and became a British citizen and advertising copywriter, spending most of his life in London. Rushdie later wrote a surrealistic novel, The Satanic Verses, satirizing the Islamic prophet Mohammed, for which the Moslem dictatorship Iran sentenced Rushdie—and any and all connected to publishing or selling the book—to death on Valentine’s Day in 1989.

Neither Britain nor the United States retaliated against this act of war. Forced into hiding, Rushdie eventually moved to America, becoming an American citizen in 2016. He told Time magazine in 2017 that he no longer took Iran’s…