Iran: Rushdie and supporters to blame for attack

DUBAI ( Reuters) – No one has the right to level accusations against Iran over Friday’s attack on Salman Rushdie, for which he is to blame after denigrating the world’s Muslims, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Monday.

The novelist, who has lived under a death threat for decades since enraging clerical authorities in Iran through his writing, is recovering after being repeatedly stabbed at a public appearance in New York State.

In Iran’s first official reaction to Friday’s attack, ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said freedom of speech did not justify Rushdie’s insults against religion. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses is viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages.

“During the attack on Salman Rushdie, we do not consider anyone other than himself and his supporters worthy of... reproach and condemnation,” Kanaani told a news briefing. “No one has the right to accuse Iran in this regard.”

Writers and politicians around the world have condemned the attack. Rushdie had sustained severe injuries, including nerve damage in his arm and wounds to his liver, and was likely to lose an eye, his agent told Reuters.

Iranian state institutions had incited violence against Rushdie for generations, and state- affiliated media had gloated about the attempt on his life, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Sunday.

The Indian- born writer has had a bounty on his head since The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. The following year, Iran’s then supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling on Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication.

In 1991, the novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death. A former student of Igarashi’s on Monday renewed calls for his murder to be solved, the Ibaraki Shimbun newspaper reported.

An investigation was still active, and the statute of limitations on the crime, which expired in 2006, could be lifted, a police representative told Reuters.

The novel’s Italian translator was wounded in 1991, and its Norwegian publisher was shot and seriously wounded two years later.

In 1998, Iran’s pro- reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the threat against Rushdie – who had lived in hiding for nine years – was over.

But in 2019, Twitter suspended Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s account over a tweet that said the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”

Rushdie, 75, has lived relatively openly in recent years.

He was about to deliver a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York on the importance of the United States as a haven for targeted artists when police say a 24- year- old man rushed the stage and stabbed him.

Kanaani said Rushdie had “exposed himself to popular outrage by insulting Islamic sanctities and crossing the redlines of 1.5 billion Muslims.”

Iran had no other information about the novelist’s suspected assailant except what had appeared in media, he said.