In one of the great Curb Your Enthusiasm vignettes, Larry David wanted to make a musical called “Fatwa,” the word itself giggle-worthy. But the fatwa on Salman Rushdie was no joke. Last week a lone, determined man got past light security at Chautauqua, a famous writers conference and knifed the author of Midnight’s Children and an Islam-offending novel called The Satanic Verses. As the story goes, without having ever read the book, the Ayatollah declared a bounty on Rushdie who had imagined mortal qualities in the prophet Mohammed. A translator was murdered in the ensuing outrage. 

Meanwhile, Rushdie had been in hiding in safe houses in England and the States for decades. In the 1980’s, someone sent the book to the American writer Paul Bowles who resided in Tangier, and worried about his expatriate status there if the authorities found out he possessed such a book. One year a hushed event brought the writer to the New York Public Library’s main branch for a PEN forum, an affirmation of freedom of expression; many celebrated Rushdie and the daring it took to pull this off. Needless to say, security was tight. And over time, Salman Rushdie let his guard down.

Safe in America, Salman had a reputation for party-going; he was something of a ladies’ man. Enormously charming, he became PEN’s president, a publicly known position. He remained unharmed for 33 years after the fatwa was declared, a popular man of letters, a prolific writer on book tours and other events. When last I saw him, at the Morgan Library in 2017, we chatted about the writer/actress Carrie Fisher who had just died—suddenly of a heart attack on an overseas flight. Salman had just seen her in London and was the last person to have had dinner with her. Just a day in the life of an active man about town, famous, with many friends, testing fate, as he still does even as he recovers from the assault.

PEN has invited its members to a reading of Salman Rushdie’s work to take place on the steps of the New York Public Library this Friday: Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Tina Brown, Gay Talese and many more will attend. As with our Democracy, maintaining the “Freedom to Write” is an ongoing challenge.