Salman Rushdie

His novel The Satanic Verses (1988) provoked widespread protests in many countries, and in February 1989 a fatwa in Iran called for his death; he lived for years under British police protection, moving between safe houses. He was knighted in 2007 and made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2022. On 12 August 2022 an attacker stabbed him on stage in New York State before a lecture, costing him the sight of one eye and damaging his hand and liver; he recounted the experience in Knife (2024). ^{1 2}

Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family — family background, which is not an attestation of his own position. His own position he stated himself, repeatedly, across decades: in a 1989 interview with the Far Eastern Economic Review he said, "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu"; and in a 2006 interview with PBS he called himself a "hardline atheist". The counter-episode is preserved in his record: on 15 December 1990, under the fatwa, he issued a statement reaffirming his Muslim faith — a statement he said by 1992 he regretted and whose language he had not written; his later statements of 2006 postdate and supersede it. The museum accordingly records his faith as atheist-or-sceptic on the basis of his own words, with the 1990 episode and its withdrawal kept in the record. Labels applied by his opponents in the fatwa years are not attestations either way, and the Arabic article's "atheism" portal is an editorial filing, not a text. ^{1 3 4}

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