Salman Rushdie stabbed: History of attacks on other scholars who translated Satanic Verses

As the acclaimed Satanic Verses novelist, Salman Rushdie became the victim of an on-stage assault, stabbed in midst of a packed amphitheatre at an event in New York, the incident draws focus on the Japanese scholar Hitoshi Igarashi, 44 as 'history repeats itself.' Igarashi was found dead under mysterious circumstances in the year 1991. The scholar of Arabic and Persian literature and history had translated Salman Rushdie’s much-irked book on Islamic theology The Satanist Verses.

"Scholars can't be worried about what will happen to them as a result of their work," Igarashi, a profound academician said in interviews as he had become the world's first Japanese translator of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. And his murder remains unsolved. Former CIA analyst and National Security Council staff members told the press that they believed the Iranians were responsible for Igarashi’s murder and that the cold murder cases may have been provoked by Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie. 

On Friday, the original author of the book had to be airlifted to a hospital after he was knifed on stage multiple times and sustained critical injuries. The shocking incident had an unmistakable pattern. The New York state police are yet to issue a statement on what motivated the crime. On October 11, 1993, somebody similarly shot William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses in Oslo, but apparently, he survived. None of the assassins could ever be caught.

Both Igarashi and Rushdie including those involved in the publication and distribution of the controversial book had fatwas issued by Iranian Supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who labelled the composition a direct violation of the Iranian government. While no specific charges could be bright against the Japanese translator, he was recovered and murdered brutally in his University of Tsukuba office on the night of July 1991. Igarashi held solid philology in Islamic studies and widely questioned Western claim to freedom of expression and the Islamist self-righteousness in Rushdie's work simultaneously. 

In 1976 the Japanese translator was enrolled at the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy in Iran, during the waning days of the Shah. 

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The now deceased Igarashi was employed as the assistant professor of comparative Islamic culture at Tsukuba University, northeast of Tokyo in subsequent years, and widely composed work on Islam, The Islamic Renaissance, as well as medicine and spirituality of the East. His body was found in the morning by a janitorial staff member. Besides transcribing Rushdie's The Satanic Verses into the Japanese language,  Igarashi also translated physician-philosopher Avicenna's The Canon of Medicine, popularized as an encyclopedia of medicine. 

Igarashi defended the novelist Salman Rushdie's literary work

Igarashi defended the novelist Salman Rushdie's literary work. On multiple occasions, the Japanese scholar had redefined the novel’s essence as one in line with Islamic mystical Sufi thought. Rushdie was not anti-Islamic, he had argued, noting the former's atheism belief. The Japanese translator had gone so far as to say that Rushdie’s “passage to England, just like Passage to India by E. M. Foster, represented a literature of exile and could be judiciously compared to the Hejra by Muhammad, to begin with, or to the "Western Exile" in Kairouan by Suhrawardi”. It may be eccentric to note that Igarashi's body was found with a deep knife wound in the neck and cuts on the hands and face, according to the Japanese police's statements issued later. 

In a separate, likely a related incident, Ettore Capriolo, 61, the translator of the Italian version of The Satanic Verses also survived a  knife assault, sustaining critical injuries on his neck, chest and hands. He described his assailant to have been of an Iranian ethnicity, adding that the latter had wanted the translation of a Muslim pamphlet. He had, although, managed to escape after committing the crime. Days later, the Italian law enforcement out ruled any connection between the assault to Rushdie’s book.

In 1989, around the time that British-Indian author's The Satanic Verses was rebuked, and banned, Igarashi had described it as a book that unfurled a realistic take on Islamic theology and exposed Rushdie's deep-rooted love-hate relationship with India. Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, denounced Rushdie’s novel as blasphemy and pronounced 'death' on the writer. Norwegian translator William Nygaard also became the victim of the fatwa as a result of a respective translation.