Hadi Matar

I used to run into Salman Rushdie at London literary parties a couple of decades ago, before he became a US citizen in 2016 and largely made his life there afterwards. He was always charming and likable company, during the brief conversations that we had, and the worst that I would say of him is that he was all too aware of his own fame and reputation. Certainly, I was not the only one in a long line of admirers and acolytes wishing for a couple of moments with the great man, and Rushdie certainly paid rather more attention to the attractive women or girls than he did to the rather gauche young men who had read Midnight’s Children or The Satanic Verses.

I know that our readers have led varied and colorful lives, but I would suggest that few, if indeed any, of you have spent decades cowering under the daily terror of a fatwah imposed upon you by a totalitarian state because of a literary novel that you once wrote. I would also suggest that, when Salman Rushdie — for he had that dubious privilege — emerged from a lengthy, frightening and tedious period of hiding, he chose to immerse himself in the social life of both London and the United States to show that he was not afraid, and that the threats and grimacing of extremists did not mean that he was not entitled to lead his own version of his best life. He was right to do so.