Why Salman Rushdie is a bloodied role model for freedom of expression

The horrific stabbing of Salman Rushdie is a brazen brooding attack on the freedom of writers to investigate things that others hold in their hearts and souls.

Just like lifestyle, religion, politics, doctrine and beliefs.

All these things are the buzz in our blood. We are pack animals, afraid in the dark, who need these metaphorical fences and boundaries to keep us in – and the enemy out.

And as writers, it is our job to investigate these boundaries and their creators, even lampoon them, draw conclusions on the walls of our man-made borders.

We need to be able to write about human fears.

Salman Rushdie was stabbed in the liver, the back, the neck and the face on stage in front of hundreds of people in New York city.

The reason? An old man and a religion had decided that he should die because he had written The Satanic Verses.

The Satanic Verses investigates a short text reputed to have been included in the Qur’an at the suggestion of Satan rather than by divine inspiration when Muhammad was issuing authentic verses.

Because of his thoughts and interpretation of these verses he became the victim of a fatwa. He had become a rebel with only a narrow path to the future.

And that fatwa haunted him for more than 30 years. And like cancer to a smoker, almost inevitably, one day the horror of the past rose and wrapped its dark clouds around him.

Salman Rushdie, over thirty years, metamorphosed from being a rather irritating pundit with a poetic turn of phrase into a world renowned writer – an academic in bottle-bottom glasses and a scraggly beard. Then he became a prisoner inside his own world and ours.

A few days ago he became the victim of fate.

Today he is a survivor. And a hero to all of us who want to write the truth.

JOIN ME IN WRITING A FEW WORDS OF THANK YOU BELOW TO ALL WRITERS WHO STAND UP FOR WHAT IS RIGHT…