I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. If he ever felt the need for some vestige of anonymity, he wore a baseball cap. He wrote book after book, taught, lectured, travelled, met with readers, married, divorced, and became a fixture in the city that was his adopted home. Within a year, Ahmadinejad was out of office and out of favor with the mullahs. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.” “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice. In 2012, during the annual autumn gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, I joined a small meeting of reporters with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, and I asked him if the multimillion-dollar bounty that an Iranian foundation had placed on Rushdie’s head had been rescinded.
There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded.
A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination.
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