“Dear Salman Rushdie…”: Isabelle Adjani’s commitment to fighting religious fundamentalism

On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against British writer Salman Rushdie after the publication, five months earlier, of The Satanic Verses . The Iranian Revolutionary Guard deemed the novel blasphemous. Its author must be killed. It was a bolt from the blue, not really a surprise to Isabelle Adjani. For several weeks, the actress had been discussing the subject with philosopher André Glucksmann (1937-2015). And for three years, she had been discussing others.

Glucksmann and Adjani even considered writing a book together, in the form of a dialogue, in which they would return, among other things, to the "rumor" that had so plagued the actress's life three years earlier (it was said that she had AIDS). The project never saw the light of day, but this did not stop their exchanges. Since the autumn of 1988, they had been following the fate of Rushdie after the publication of his novel: the fact that the writer was forced to be accompanied by a bodyguard and then to go into hiding, the burning of copies of The Satanic Verses in the British towns of Bolton and then Bradford, the demonstrations against the book in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, and in London...

Coincidentally, in December 1988, Bruno Nuytten's Camille Claudel was released, the first film since L'Eté meurtrier (1983) to star Isabelle Adjani, a hiatus of more than five years. Five years! Enough to put her back in the spotlight, at a time when Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding.

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