2022.08.17 不朽的萨尔曼-拉什迪

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不朽的萨尔曼-拉什迪
这次袭击不仅是对一位伟大而勇敢的作家的暴行，也是对真理和美本身的暴行。它必须有一个响亮的回应。

伯纳德-亨利-莱维报道
萨尔曼-拉什迪的照片肖像
Christopher Anderson / Magnum
2022年8月17日

他的朋友、他的读者和萨尔曼-拉什迪本人最终都停止了对法特瓦的思考。他在纽约过着几乎正常的生活。几十年来，他只有一个非常谨慎的、几乎看不见的安保人员。

我记得在2017年法国总统选举后不久，埃马纽埃尔-马克龙邀请萨尔曼和我在巴黎爱丽舍宫喝咖啡。他对萨勒曼的保护措施如此之少感到惊讶。"我不是烈士的类型，"萨尔曼开玩笑说。"我只是一个作家。为什么会有人对一个作家有这么大的怨恨呢？"

嗯，他错了。这种杀手从不松懈。你可以鄙视他们，你可以把他们赶出你的脑海--历史在你的轨道上设置的赏金猎人和疯子--但这群人永远不会忘记你。

阅读。都是因为萨尔曼-拉什迪写了一本书

这就是我的朋友萨尔曼可能掌握的情况，在星期五的袭击中，一名男子侵入肖托夸研究所的舞台并开始刺杀他，那几秒钟令人困惑。当我得知萨勒曼的潜在刺客在他的脖子上砍了一刀时，我想起了其他那些狂热主义受害者的命运，塞缪尔-帕蒂、雅克-哈梅尔神父和丹尼尔-珀尔。他不得不为自己的生命而战，受了重伤，虽然现在至少已经脱离了呼吸机。

一股恐惧和恐怖的浪潮正在笼罩着我们所有人。除了等待来自宾夕法尼亚州医院的消息外，我没有心思做什么，因为萨尔曼被直升机送往那里，让记忆回到我身边--自阿亚图拉-霍梅尼公开判处他死刑以来的33年里，我对萨尔曼-拉什迪的记忆。

我想说的是，在法特瓦三年后，在赫尔辛基举行的北欧理事会会议上，我决定与萨尔曼分享我的发言时间。我们没有提前通知，只有我的朋友瑞典作家加比-格莱赫曼是我们计划的参与者。当萨尔曼和我一起上台时，观众们屏住了呼吸--仿佛面前是一个幽灵，或者一个被判处死刑的人在第11个小时被释放，另一个 "戴着铁面具的人 "从他的星球巴士底狱中被释放。然后他开始说话，面带微笑，他那双奇怪的半月形眼睛里闪烁着光芒，其突出的瞳孔使眼白黯淡无光。他就艺术和小说的力量即兴发表了一段令人眼花缭乱的独白，说在他的作品和他的生活之间，他永远会选择他的作品。他获得了热烈的掌声。

然后，在1990年代中期，有一次去尼斯的私人旅行。国泰航空封锁了第一排的座位。我记得，他在最后一刻带着他的安保人员登机，就在舱门关闭之前，在我们目睹了警察、服务车辆和跑道上闪烁的灯光的神秘芭蕾之后。也是在这一次，当他出现在飞机上时，人们普遍感到震惊。一位妇女声称她生病了。另一名妇女要求被放下飞机。其余的乘客，一旦最初的惊讶消失后，便爆发出持续的掌声。

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我想到了另一个懦弱的灵魂。这个人曾经是法国的外交部长，罗兰-杜马。La Règle du jeu是萨尔曼和我以及其他一些人在1990年创办的文学杂志，邀请萨尔曼来法国与他的一些巴黎朋友见面。我记得，部长的行为是可耻的，他下令萨尔曼，一个欧洲公民，需要签证才能进入法国。然后他拒绝了签证，理由是他不能保证萨尔曼的安全。大仲马自己的同事，文化部长杰克-兰提出抗议。我的朋友商人弗朗索瓦-皮诺（François Pinault）提出借给我们一架飞机并提供必要的保护。弗朗索瓦-密特朗总统不得不亲自解决这个问题。瞧，希望进行贸易交易和武器销售的法国屈服于伏尔泰的精神。欢迎，萨尔曼先生。

摘自2005年3月号。事后看来，反恐战争始于萨尔曼-拉什迪

又是一个没有骨气的人。查尔斯王子。1993年，我在英国驻巴黎大使馆举办的午餐会上见到他。当我问他对整个事件的看法时，王子咆哮道："萨尔曼不是一个好作家。"他还说，"保护他让英国的王室付出了沉重的代价。" 关于这一点，萨尔曼的另一位朋友马丁-艾米斯后来说。"保护威尔士王子的代价要大得多，据我所知，他还没有产生任何有意义的东西。" 新闻界和公众舆论这一次站在了受迫害作家的一边。

世界报》在1998年派我去伦敦报道这位世界上最隐居的作家的日常生活。在斯科特餐厅吃完午餐后，我们在梅菲尔区漫步。我们经过肯辛顿宫，萨尔曼像前一年戴安娜王妃去世后的许多伦敦人一样，匆匆赶往那里。我们参观了国家肖像馆，观看了摄影师亨利-卡蒂埃-布列松的肖像画展。人们走到我的同伴身边。他说："你是萨尔曼-拉什迪吗？"（"我希望是；我尽力而为，"他说。）在那一天，他把表现得好像他头上没有悬着达摩克利斯之剑一样，这是一种荣誉。他行使了他的自由，他的正常生活，就像其他人为保持身材而锻炼一样。在我离开后，不幸的是，他又回到了他的无墙监狱。

我还记得我们在1993年计划的萨拉热窝之行。波斯尼亚的总统阿利雅-伊泽特贝戈维奇原则上欢迎这次访问。萨尔曼想去。他远不是那些批评他的人把他说成是伊斯兰恐惧症患者，他是温和伊斯兰教的朋友和盟友。难道他不是像那些保卫萨拉热窝的人一样，是站在启蒙一边战斗的《古兰经》的保卫者？但是，当时的联合国秘书长布特罗斯-布特罗斯-加利（在当之无愧地跌入历史的垃圾堆之前）以虚假的借口反对这次旅行。我们不得不放弃这个计划。

我记得我们在伦敦观众面前的一次谈话，萨勒曼说他非常想念他童年时在印度的伊斯兰教。他解释说："最伟大的穆斯林思想一直是心胸宽广的，"。"当我回想起我的祖父母的时代，我的父母的时代，伊斯兰教努力成为世界性的。它提出问题并参与争论。它是活的。" 萨尔曼是这种形式的伊斯兰教的儿子。他显然不反对亵渎，因为在他眼里，亵渎与表达和思想自由是不可分割的；但我也不相信他曾亵渎过他父母的信条。

我记得我们之间的一次谈话，在巴黎的犹太广播电台RCJ上，他猜测如果法特瓦在不是传真机而是社交媒体的时代发布，会有什么后果。"我记得，他说："一条推特就能搅动整个地球。在YouTube上的5分钟足以引发全世界同时进行的示威活动。如果我的法特瓦发生在互联网时代，它会是致命的吗？我不知道。" 现在他知道了。唉。

我记得2004年他与帕德玛-拉克希米的婚礼：玫瑰花瓣雨、印度管弦乐队、西塔琴和鼓声、将护身符塞到他爱人的脚踝上的行为，他的朋友和儿子都在场。他很高兴。

我记得巴拉克-奥巴马第一次当选总统的那个晚上。我们在纽约的一个镶板公寓里参加了一个派对，里面有很多文学家、演员、记者、竞选捐款人和慈善家。一阵手机铃声响起。是当选总统打来的，他要亲自感谢萨尔曼的支持。

我记得法国历史学家皮埃尔-诺拉、《浩劫》导演克劳德-朗兹曼和我为1994年欧洲文化电视频道Arte的一部纪录片来采访萨尔曼的那一天。如果我没有记错的话，我们是在伦敦一个高档社区的俱乐部的图书馆里拍摄了这次谈话。朗兹曼对萨尔曼的权威气息感到恼火。诺拉对他的老派朋友的恼怒感到恼怒。他想保护朗兹曼不受自己和他众所周知的重提旧事的倾向的影响。萨尔曼喜欢他们的表演。他喜欢这些他所崇拜的老前辈们似乎又陷入了未解决的青春期谈话中。

我记得在安提布海滩上的一天，活着的快乐，正午的阳光，热浪荡漾在你能看到的地方，分享对电影和女演员的热爱，特别是让-吕克-戈达尔的《蔑视》，卡普里岛马拉帕尔特之家的真正主人（戈达尔把它作为电影的主要场景）。那一天，萨尔曼最希望的就是有一天能够翻拍《诺博士》或《来自俄罗斯的爱情》。美好的生活。对生活的渴望，对生活方式的倍增的渴望。与死刑犯恰恰相反。

我在想我们最近几年在纽约一起吃的晚餐。他不想再听到关于法特瓦的任何消息。我们谈到了弗朗索瓦-拉伯雷、托尼-莫里森的《所罗门之歌》、劳伦斯-斯特恩、乔治-艾略特（一个他永远无法进入的作家）和V.S.奈保尔，奈保尔的死让他大受打击。文学在所有其他事物之前，而且高于所有其他事物! 面对世界的喧嚣，他希望说："请把声音关小！" 这显然没有阻止他在几个月前，在乌克兰战争刚开始的时候，决定我们迫切需要撰写对俄罗斯进行制裁的呼吁，并帮助说服斯汀和西恩-潘加入这一运动。

这么多年来，让我印象深刻的是我的朋友的默默无闻的英雄主义。他非常明白，西方政府会不时地驱逐一个假冒的伊朗外交官，这可能是出于对他的安全的担忧，因为法特瓦。他知道，尽管发生了《查理周刊》大屠杀和其他屠杀事件，自诩为穆斯林人民的朋友仍然坚持认为，任何人都无权冒犯他人的信仰，如果冒犯者受到伤害，只能怪他自己。他在演讲中从未被问及一个永恒的问题。在了解了他今天所知道的一切之后，他是否曾后悔写了《撒旦诗篇》，这部作品像诅咒一样跟着他？

但他害怕吗？不，他没有。他顶多承认自己有一个雷达，有时会警告他可能存在的危险。

格雷姆-伍德：萨尔曼-拉什迪和攻击性崇拜

有一次--只是一次，很久以前--我听到他说了一句奇怪的话，说杀人狂魔有一个诀窍，那就是反思自己的复仇，并在最不经意的时候冷酷地实施。想想墨索里尼和罗塞利兄弟；斯大林和伊尼亚斯-雷斯；普京和中毒的寡头。有一天，会出现一个什叶派的拉蒙-梅卡德，没有人会看到他的到来。

我相信这就是上周五在肖托夸研究所的情况，当萨尔曼-拉什迪看到那个要处决他的人跃上舞台时。

当他从我所想象的痛苦的地狱中走出来时，情况还会是这样吗？他心中的艺术家将继续相信，生活是一场悲剧，一个充满了声音和愤怒的故事，由一个白痴讲述。当他听到朋友们告诉他，如果一个人在一生中能成为狄更斯、巴尔扎克和泰戈尔，那么他完全可以被认为是不朽的。

但他会读到伊朗的文章，即政权的半官方报纸，在他与死神搏斗的时候，为 "魔鬼的脖子 "被 "用剃刀劈开 "而欣喜。他将看到极端保守的报纸《Kayhan》在他康复的时候，宣布祝福 "用刀子撕开上帝之敌的脖子的人的手"。

而萨勒曼将不得不适应这个一直让他感到恐惧的想法，即成为一个人类的象征，成为一场世界战争中的人质，无论他是否愿意，他自己的生命和死亡已经成为每个人的事情。这就是为什么我们这些不能保护他的人--我们所有人--现在有责任履行。

这种针对他的身体和书籍的恐怖行为，绝对是针对世界上所有书籍的恐怖行为。这种对言论自由的暴行需要一个响亮的回应。

各个国家将有自己的发言权。国际社会也必须向这一罪行的发起者发出信号，萨尔曼-拉什迪事件已经造成了一个新的分裂，一个之前和一个之后。

至于他的朋友、他的同行、媒体和其他公众意见重要的人，我们都要做出承诺。那就是确保《撒旦诗篇》的作者获得最高的文学荣誉。确保萨尔曼-拉什迪以他所有作家的名义和自己的名义获得几周后将颁发的诺贝尔文学奖。

我无法想象今天会有其他作家希望代替他赢得这个奖项。运动现在开始了。

伯纳德-亨利-莱维是一位哲学家、活动家和电影制片人，他写了许多书，包括《犹太教的天才》、《美国迷魂记》、《有人性的野蛮》、《谁杀了丹尼尔-珀尔》以及最近的《看见的意愿》。来自痛苦和希望世界的消息》。




The Immortal Salman Rushdie
The attack was an outrage not only against a great and brave author but against truth and beauty themselves. It must have a ringing response.

By Bernard-Henri Lévy
A photo portrait of Salman Rushdie
Christopher Anderson / Magnum
AUGUST 17, 2022
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His friends, his readers, and Salman Rushdie himself eventually stopped thinking about the fatwa. He was living an almost normal life in New York. For decades, he had had no more than a very discreet, nearly invisible security detail.

I recall the day, shortly after the French presidential election in 2017, that Emmanuel Macron invited Salman and me for coffee at the Élysée Palace in Paris. He was astonished that Salman had so little protection. “I’m not the martyr type,” Salman joked. “I’m just a writer. Why would anyone hold such a big grudge against a writer?”

Well, he was wrong. This kind of killer never lets up. You can despise them, you can push them out of your mind—the bounty hunters and lunatics that history sets on your tracks—but the pack never forgets about you.

Read: All because Salman Rushdie wrote a book

And that is what my friend Salman may have grasped, in the bewildering seconds of Friday’s attack when a man invaded the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and started stabbing him. I was reminded of the fate of those other victims of fanaticism, Samuel Paty, Father Jacques Hamel, and Daniel Pearl, when I learned that Salman’s would-be assassin had slashed at his neck. He was left fighting for his life, gravely injured, though at least now off a ventilator.

A wave of terror and horror is breaking over us all. I don’t have the heart to do much besides wait for news to trickle out from the hospital in Pennsylvania where Salman was taken by helicopter and let the memories come back to me—my memories of Salman Rushdie over the 33 years that have passed since Ayatollah Khomeini publicly sentenced him to death.

Irecall a meeting of the Nordic Council in Helsinki, three years after the fatwa, when I decided to share my speaking time with Salman. We gave no advance notice, and only my friend the Swedish author Gabi Gleichmann was party to our plan. When Salman took the stage with me, the audience held its breath—as though before it was a ghost, or a man condemned to death reprieved at the 11th hour, another “man in the iron mask” on the loose from his planetary Bastille. Then he began to speak, smiling and with a twinkle in those strange, half-moon eyes of his, with their prominent pupils that eclipse the whites. He improvised a dazzling monologue on art and the power of the novel, saying that between his work and his life, he would always choose his work. He received a standing ovation.

Then there was a private trip to Nice, in the mid-1990s. Air Inter blocked off the first row. As I recall, he boarded at the last minute with his security detail, just before the doors closed, after we had witnessed a mysterious ballet of police, service vehicles, and flashing lights on the runway. On this occasion, too, when he appeared on the plane, there was generalized shock. One woman claimed that she was ill. Another woman demanded to be let off the plane. The rest of the passengers, once the initial surprise wore off, broke into sustained applause.

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Another cowardly soul comes to mind. This one was once France’s foreign minister, Roland Dumas. La Règle du jeu, a literary magazine that Salman and I and some others founded in 1990, invited Salman to come to France to meet up with some of his Parisian friends. As I remember, the minister behaved shamefully, decreeing that Salman, a citizen of Europe, needed a visa to enter France. Then he denied the visa on the grounds that he couldn’t guarantee Salman’s security. Dumas’s own colleague, Minister of Culture Jack Lang, protested. My friend the businessman François Pinault offered to lend us a plane and to provide the necessary protection. President François Mitterrand himself had to settle the matter. And lo, the France that was hoping for trade deals and arms sales yielded to the spirit of Voltaire. Bienvenue, Monsieur Salman.

From the March 2005 issue: In hindsight, the war on terror began with Salman Rushdie

Yet another spineless individual: Prince Charles. In 1993, I met him at a lunch hosted by the British embassy in Paris. “Salman is not a good writer,” growled the prince when I asked him what he thought of the whole affair, adding that “protecting him costs England’s crown dearly.” On this, Martin Amis, another of Salman’s friends, later remarked: “It costs a lot more to protect the Prince of Wales, who has not, as far as I know, produced anything of interest.” The press and public opinion, for once, took the side of the persecuted writer.

Le Monde sent me to London in 1998 to report on the daily life of the world’s most reclusive writer. After lunch at Scott’s, we strolled through Mayfair. We passed Kensington Palace, to which Salman had rushed, as many Londoners did in the days after Princess Diana died, the previous year. We visited the National Portrait Gallery to see an exhibition of portraits by the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. People approached my companion: “Are you Salman Rushdie?” (“I hope so; I do my best,” he said.) He made it a point of honor, on that day, to act as if he did not have the sword of Damocles hanging over his head. He exercised his freedom, his normal life, the way others exercise to stay in shape. Upon my departure, alas, he returned to his prison without walls.

Iremember the trip to Sarajevo we planned in 1993. Bosnia’s president, Alija Izetbegović, welcomed the visit in principle. Salman wanted to go. Far from being the Islamophobe the lowest of his critics make him out to be, he is a friend and ally of moderate Islam. Was he not the defender of a Quran that fights on the side of enlightenment, as were those defending Sarajevo? But a certain Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the secretary-general of the United Nations (before falling, deservedly, into the dustbin of history), opposed the trip on spurious pretexts. We had to abandon the plan.

I remember a conversation we had in front of an audience in London, where Salman said how much he missed the Islam of his childhood in India. “The greatest of Muslim thought has been broad-minded,” he explained. “When I think back to my grandparents’ time, my parents’ time, Islam strove to be cosmopolitan. It raised questions and engaged in argument. It was alive.” Salman is the son of that form of Islam. He obviously has nothing against blasphemy, because blasphemy, in his eyes, is inseparable from freedom of expression and thought; but neither do I believe that he has ever blasphemed against the creed of his parents.

I remember a conversation between us, in Paris, on the Jewish radio station RCJ, when he speculated on what the fatwa would have entailed if it had been issued in the era not of the fax machine but of social media. “A tweet is all it takes,” he said, as I recall, “to stir up the planet. Five minutes on YouTube is enough to trigger simultaneous demonstrations throughout the world. If my fatwa had occurred in the internet age, would it have been fatal? I don’t know.” Now he knows. Alas.

I remember his wedding to Padma Lakshmi, in 2004: the shower of rose petals, the Indian orchestra, sitars and drums, the act of slipping an amulet onto the ankle of his beloved, his friends and son in attendance. He was happy.

I remember the night of Barack Obama’s first presidential election. We were at a party in a paneled New York apartment with a mix of literary types, actors, journalists, campaign donors, and philanthropists. A cellphone rang. It was the president-elect calling to thank Salman personally for his support.

I remember the day the French historian Pierre Nora; Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah; and I came to interview Salman for a 1994 documentary for the European cultural TV channel Arte. We filmed the conversation, if I remember correctly, in the library of a club in an upscale London neighborhood. Lanzmann was annoyed by Salman’s air of authority. Nora was annoyed by the annoyance of his old-school friend. He wanted to protect Lanzmann from himself and his well-known tendency to rehash old quarrels. Salman enjoyed the show they put on. He liked the idea that these old-timers, whom he admired, seemed to fall back into an unresolved adolescent conversation.

I remember a day on the beach in Antibes, the pleasure of being alive, the noon sun, heat waves rippling as far as you could see, sharing a love of movies and actresses, especially Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, the real owner of the Casa Malaparte in Capri (which Godard used as his film’s main setting). That day, Salman wanted nothing so much as to be able one day to do a remake of Dr. No or From Russia With Love. The good life. An appetite for living and for multiplying the ways of living. The opposite of a condemned man.

I mull over our dinners together in New York in recent years. He didn’t want to hear any more about the fatwa. We talked about François Rabelais, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Laurence Sterne, George Eliot (a writer he could never get into), and V. S. Naipaul, whose death had devastated him. Literature before and above all else! The wish, faced with the fracas of the world, to say, “Please, turn down the sound!” Which obviously did not prevent him, a few months ago, at the very beginning of the war in Ukraine, from deciding that it was urgent for us to pen an appeal for sanctions against Russia and to help persuade Sting and Sean Penn to join the campaign.

What has struck me, over all these years, is the quiet heroism of my friend. He understood very well that, from time to time, a Western government would expel a fake Iranian diplomat and that this might be out of concern for his safety because of the fatwa. He knew that self-styled friends of the Muslim people were still insisting, despite the Charlie Hebdo massacre and other slaughters, that no one had the right to offend others’ faith and that, if harm should befall the offender, he had only himself to blame. And never did a speaking engagement go by without his being asked the eternal question: Knowing everything he knew today, did he ever regret having written The Satanic Verses, a work that has followed him like a curse?

But was he afraid? No, he was not. At most, he would confess to having a radar that sometimes warned him of possible danger.

Graeme Wood: Salman Rushdie and the cult of offense

And once—just once, a long time ago—I heard him make an odd remark about the knack master killers have for ruminating on their vengeance and carrying it out coldly when least expected. Think Mussolini and the Rosselli brothers; Stalin and Ignace Reiss; Putin and the poisoned oligarchs. And one day, a Shiite Ramón Mercader whom no one would see coming.

I believe that is where things stood, last Friday at the Chautauqua Institution, when Salman Rushdie saw the man who meant to execute him leap onto the stage.

Will this still be where things stand when he emerges from the hell of pain in which I imagine him? The artist in him will continue to believe that life is a tragedy, a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot. And he will not be surprised to hear friends tell him that if one can be Dickens, Balzac, and Tagore in a single life, one could well be considered immortal.

But he will read the article in Iran, the semi-official newspaper of the regime, which, while he was fighting death, rejoiced that “the devil’s neck” was “struck with a razor.” He will see the ultraconservative newspaper Kayhan pronouncing a blessing, while he was recovering, on “the hand of the man who tore the neck of the enemy of God with a knife.”

And Salman will have to get used to the idea, one that always petrified him, of being a human symbol, a hostage in a war of the worlds in which, like it or not, his own life and death have become everybody’s business. That is why those of us who could not protect him—all of us—now have a duty to perform.

This act of terror against his body and his books is an absolute act of terror against all the world’s books. Such an outrage against freedom of expression calls for a ringing response.

Individual nations will have their say. The international community, too, must signal to the sponsors of this crime that this Salman Rushdie affair has created a new division, a time before and a time after.

As for his friends, his peers, media, and others for whom public opinion counts for something, we all have a commitment to make. And that is to ensure that the author of The Satanic Verses receives the highest of literary honors. To see that, in the name of all his fellow authors and in his own name, Salman Rushdie receives the Nobel Prize in Literature that is due to be awarded in a few weeks.

I cannot imagine any other writer today would wish to win it in his stead. The campaign begins now.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and the author of numerous books including The Genius of Judaism, American Vertigo, Barbarism with a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and, most recently, The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope.