The force that drives water through rocks.
direct my red blood.
(Dylan Thomas)
One.
Avenida 24 de Julho is one of the main arteries of Lisbon and connects the eastern part of the city with the one that projects towards the sea.
At any time of day, traffic flow is reasonably fluid, but one morning in the spring of 2022 one of the lanes was completely blocked.
Something strange was happening.
In the middle of one of the pedestrian crossings, next to the traffic light, there was a grayish rabbit motionless.
When the cars made to move forward, the rabbit, disoriented, made small jumps, but did not move from its place.
Then, a young man got out of his vehicle, grabbed the rabbit by the neck, caressed its ears and allowed himself to be photographed with it in his lap.
One of the videos that was released then showed the young man in the middle of traffic with the intruder in his hands.
The boy was dark, with very dark hair cut short, prominent ears, the typical Portuguese, athletic and confident.
But none of these details would have the slightest importance, and the very normal scene of the rescue of an animal lost among the cars would have faded from memory, if shortly after, on August 12, Salman Rushdie had not been the victim of an attack that shocked to the world.
Two.
It is not possible to summarize certain realities, but in any case, we can condense the attack in the following way: when Salman Rushdie was preparing to give a lecture in Chautauqua, in the state of New York, before a packed auditorium, a young man came up on stage with a knife and dealt more than 10 blows to different vital areas of the body of the author of
The Satanic Verses
, without it being possible to stop him in the first moments.
During those days, the images of the attack were reproduced thousands of times, causing great commiseration.
A fatwa launched by Iran 33 years earlier, according to which the writer should be executed for blasphemies against Allah, had been close to being consummated.
The personal drama of a writer turned into the center of a paradoxical allegory in which a man with a knife chases a man with a pen, impressed Westerners in those days, as if Salman were a close relative.
In situations like these, there is no room for details, but one stuck out to me: the face of the person who carried out the attack, Hadi Matar, 24 years old when the image was released, looked incredibly similar to the boy's face. who had saved the rabbit on Avenida 24 de Julio, three months before.
They looked like they were brothers.
From the image, one could be the other and vice versa.
Three.
Since then more than a year and a half has passed.
We do not know what has become of the young American of Lebanese descent, locked up in prison.
We know about Salman Rushdie that he was physically handicapped and that he has a disturbing story to tell, but the truth is that the detail of the coincidence can't get out of my head.
Even admitting that the hand that prepares a knife to kill can be the same as the one that saves a domestic animal from being run over, and that gestures with opposite meanings coexist in the same person, as seen in the stories of tyrants and murderers, The questions continue to arise: how did young Hadi Matar's childhood go, what schools did he attend, what books did he read?
What friends did he have?
What teachers taught him, what catechisms did he memorize?
What kind of political activism did he profess?
What ideal of historical justice did he feed on to choose to become famous not for saving people, animals, forests or rivers, but for trying to execute the author of a book of which he confessed to having read only two pages?
The questions are endless, but the answers tend to be simplified.
Four.
After the attack, it was learned that shortly before he had traveled to Lebanon, where he became radicalized in the Islamic faith and in the culture of Sharia
,
and that this would explain his gesture, in which he apparently acted as a lone wolf.
His past was also reviewed and talk was made of disintegration and social resentment, usually facilitators of radicalization.
Other answers, however, implied broader theoretical horizons.
Samuel P. Huntington's book,
The Clash of Civilizations
and the Remaking of World Order
, published in 1996, was pulled from the shelves to explain that the division between East and West was what remained after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The great cultural tectonic plates faced each other face to face.
In this way, what happened on the Chautauqua stage was nothing more than the scenic image of this conflict between symbolic representatives of two different cultures.
In an almost opposite sense, the theory of the end of History and the last man, developed in the same decade by Francis Fukuyama, was used to demonstrate that the optimistic coinage of the “recognition” factor as the engine of History, of which the American culture was the radiant mirror, it had been completely surpassed.
Above all, it was demonstrated that reality destroyed all theories, and that the only proven evidence, for all to see, was that democracies are too porous and fragile, and autocratic systems too impregnable, and that they send their madmen to madness. messengers against fragile and porous democracies to destroy them.
It was said that it was necessary to close democracies, and it was stated, on the contrary, that their greatness consisted in that openness and porosity, and that their informational transfer served to contaminate autocracies with the exemplary power of freedom.
The fact is that if we gather all the fragments of truth that are included in the maximalist theses, what seems certain is that between Islamic and Christian fanaticism there is about four centuries of separation.
The transcendental mission of Hadi Matar while wielding his knife on the afternoon of August 12, 2022, and the mission of an inquisitor of the Holy Office, in the mid-17th century, sitting in his armchair, while observing people through the window, differ little. tied to a cross burned alive.
In one case or another, suddenly, in the middle of History, there are fanatics of God who become enemies of the human species.
Five.
In a speech he gave some time ago at Emory University, Salman Rushdie stated more or less the following: “Religious doctrine says: submit.
Accept what the great books say.
They already have all the answers, with the support of God's authority.
Your faith in those answers will set you free.
Without it, you are not free.
You're lost.
But the non-religious thinker says: I do not submit.
I do not accept it.
The questions have to be asked.
The question is, in itself, an answer.
The ability to possess an argument is freedom.
“To give up that freedom is to chain myself.”
These are, therefore, two different freedoms and Westerners do not accept that the first is.
The second freedom, the one that those of us on this side profess, implies much more than being free, it usually implies the ability to understand the side on which our opponent is located.
And, consequently, it implies forgiveness.
They say that Salman Rushdie's next book,
Knife
, will be published next April.
Since the author has become a metaphor, whether he wants it or not, I am waiting to read what he has to say about himself, but, above all, about the hands of the one who caused him such deep wounds.
Lídia Jorge
is a writer.
She is the author of the novel
Los memorable
(Editorial La umbría y la solana).
Translation by
Carlos Gumpert.
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