Salman Rushdie Confronts His Would-Be Assassin

The first thing you notice when picking up Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie’s account of surviving an assassination attempt two years ago, is the photo. The iconic image of the legendary writer — eyebrows cocked gently, lips slightly upturned in that impish smile concealing his razor-sharp wit — has now been augmented by a new feature: a darkened glasses lens over his right eye, which his assailant punctured with his eponymous knife.

Rushdie emerged bloodied, injured, but alive from the attack in August 2022 at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a writer’s paradise, after an Islamist born in New Jersey to Lebanese parents — to whom the author refers only as “A.” for assailant, or assassin — stormed the lightly protected stage during Rushdie’s remarks and stabbed him more than a dozen times in the stomach, neck, eye, chest, and thigh.

A. and Rushdie were swarmed onstage, and first responders managed to medevac the author by helicopter to a Pennsylvania hospital, where his life hung in the balance for a full day. His account of that mystical time of semiconsciouness is vintage Rushdie: “The reality of my books — oh, call it magic realism if you must — is now the actual reality in which I’m living. Maybe my books had been building that bridge for decades, and now the miraculous could cross it.”

His wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom Rushdie credits for his survival, as well as his children flocked to the hospital to aid in his recovery. Thousands of well-wishers wrote to him; one week after the attack, hundreds gathered in front of the New York Public Library to exhibit their admiration and support “I have no doubt,” he writes, “that all the love coming toward me — the love of strangers as well as family and friends — did a great deal to help me come through.”

A lifelong campaigner for the sanctity of free speech, Rushdie notes drily at the outset of the book how “I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife just after I came out on stage … to talk about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm.” After the 1989 fatwa imposed upon him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, following his publication of The Satanic Verses, much — but not all — of the literary world leapt to his defense. Rushdie hasn’t forgotten the perfidies of Jimmy Carter, Germaine Greer, and Roald Dahl, among many others, who “joined forces with the Islamist attack to say what a bad person I was.”

To this list of cowards, we might add Rachel Kushner, Teju Cole, and Michael Ondaatje, who boycotted, on the spurious grounds of “cultural intolerance,” PEN America’s 2015 gala, which was dedicated to the memories of the courageous Charlie Hebdo writers and editors. More recently, PEN, to whose presidency Rushdie was elected in 2004, flopped even more spectacularly when activist writers dissatisfied by the organization’s insufficiently anti-Israel stridency managed to cancel its 2024 award and gala. PEN is an organization of writers against writing, evidently.

But Rushdie overcame the initial shock and terror of the fatwa. “The only way I could stop looking, to others, like some sort of walking time bomb,” he reckoned,” was to behave, frequently and in public, as if there was nothing to be frightened of.” He was of course accompanied by bodyguards, but he maintained an active life in New York society, the notoriety of Khomeini’s decree boosting his profile and juicing his book sales. He famously took a victory lap by appearing on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2017 to demonstrate hilariously to Larry David, who’d been targeted by his own fictional fatwa, the sex appeal that a death sentence can confer. More than 30 years after The Satanic Verses was published, Rushdie reasonably figured he was out of the woods, and his security detail dwindled. Then came Chautauqua.

Following the attack, it became clear that A. had “read barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed.” The assailant also referred to Rushdie in a subsequent interview as “disingenuous,” and the author fantasizes about challenging his attacker in person in an extended meditation on the term “disingenuous.” “In American,” the fictional A. tells Rushdie, “many people pretend to be honest, but they wear masks and lie.” The assailant ultimately agrees that “disingenuous behavior deserves death.”

They proceed to debate Muslim theology, language and translation, culture, and love. “You are hated by two billion people,” A. informs Rushdie. “How must that feel, to be so hated?” Rushdie fruitlessly pleads his case, noting his activism on behalf of a mosque sited at Ground Zero, his opposition to the Indian government’s Hindu nationalism, and his expression of sympathy for Kashmiri Muslims. To no avail: “We know who you are,” A. states. “If you think you can win us over, then you are a fool.” Rushdie’s invocations of Bertrand Russell, Hans Christian Andersen, and Jodi Picoult come to naught.

The author shelves these confrontational fantasies until they threaten to become real. A. vacillates on pleading guilty, and the specter looms of Rushdie testifying against him in court, much as Samuel Beckett confronted his own attacker in a Paris courtroom. He imagines, again, what he would say in court, and concludes, sensibly, that he would say: “I don’t care about you, or the ideology that you claim to represent, and which you represent so poorly. I have my life, and my work, and there are people who love me. I care about those things.”

Along the way, Rushdie confronts his own mortality — and that of his literary friends and contemporaries. Martin Amis dies of esophageal cancer, as does Milan Kundera. Paul Auster announces he’s suffering from lung cancer. “Death was showing up at the wrong addresses,” Rushdie laments.

Readers will rejoice that Knife is replete with Rushdie’s trademark literary flourishes — the assassin’s “fake name constructed out of the real names of well-known Shia Muslim extremists,” “what I call [Mr. A] in the privacy of my home is my business;” “I’m plunging my assassin sharpness into your neck. Feel that?;” the 9/11 airplanes “slashed like deadly blades into the bodies of their targets, the Twin Towers.”

In characteristic fashion, Rushdie meditates extensively on his title term, “knife.” “The knife had severed me from this world, cut me brutally away, and placed me in this screaming bed,” he laments, mid-recovery. He confesses to having “thought a lot about The Knife as an idea”: as a tool (kitchen), a helper (Swiss Army), a facilitator of ritual (wedding cake), and as a conceptual aid (Occam’s razor). “It is morally neutral,” he concludes. “It is the misuse of knives that is immoral.” He also comes to realize that “language was my knife” and that he’s better than most at rhetorical skirmishes, if not the physical kind.

Some details should have been omitted from Rushdie’s account of his recovery. Difficulties in physical therapy, the particulars of his finger tendons, and unrelated prostate and urinary issues seem at once too personal and too picayune for a book of such elevated tone. Then, too, random potshots at “bigoted revisionism” in Florida are badly misplaced.

But ultimately, Rushdie reminds us that humanity contains multitudes. “We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason … and we also contain the antidote to that disease — courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.” May this (yes!) living legend continue for many years to remind us of our better angels and to instruct us how to channel them.

Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Reach him at [email protected].