The Tale Salman Rushdie Lived To Tell

Salman Rushdie made more than his share of enemies with the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988. Upon its release, it was one of the most controversial books of all time, fueling bombings of the offices of newspapers that dared print reviews and attempts on the lives of translators.

Even so, Rushdie never imagined the longevity of the hatreds this novel aroused, including among people who never actually sat down and read the work or indeed much of anything he has written over the course of a long career in letters.

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Rushdie sat on a stage in an auditorium in western New York, preparing to share his thoughts about the state of intellectual life and freedom of expression. Speak of the devil. Before things got underway, a curious sight met his eyes. Rushdie saw a muscular young man in the audience, wearing a black face mask and gloves, rush without warning from the aisles and up onto the stage. It was a safe guess that this was probably not an overzealous autograph seeker.

But sometimes the reality of incidents is not fully evident as they are unfolding. As Rushdie describes the attack in his riveting new memoir Knife, he never got a glimpse of the eponymous object in the assailant’s hand. He may not have grasped right off the real and immediate danger to his life, though he sensed the stranger did not mean him well. Rushdie recalls his incredulity that an attack on him could happen at a point in time so far removed from the 1988 controversy, the fatwa, the street protests, and the bombings and attacks that left a Japanese translator dead and others injured.

Rushdie had a perhaps understandable, but sadly misplaced, sense of the brevity of most of the public’s attention spans and the tendency to move on quickly to the next outrage, furor, or tabloid fodder. At that moment on the stage, Rushdie saw with his own eyes (one of which he was about to lose) the endurance of ancient hatreds.

In Knife, he describes how he refrained from doing what others in the situation would surely have done–bolted from the stage–because what he saw exerted a strange and powerful fascination. He raised a hand to try to block the attacker, but the latter stabbed him, at which point he fell and received a series of blows before people in the audience rushed to his aid.

At this point in the book, the narrative fragments and Rushdie bounces from memories of the immediate aftermath of the stabbing to the indignity of staying in a hospital where no part of his body would be free from the scrutiny of strangers, to more pleasant memories of times with his wife, without whom the ordeal might have sapped every last ounce of his will to live. He also shares reflections on the late Milan Kundera, the Ukraine war, and the politics of PEN America.

Rushdie makes a point of not using the full name of the extremist who took out one of his eyes and nearly ended his life. He adopts the moniker “A” for this individual, which he says could stand for Assassin, Avenger, Asinine, or something still less polite. The rationale he offers for this nomenclature will be familiar to anyone who has read about high-profile assassinations and attempted murders. Some people commit heinous crimes to take a shortcut to celebrity. The last thing we should do is grant their sick wish.

Reading Rushdie’s book, I thought of an interesting essay in the magazine Philosophy Now, published several years ago on the anniversary of John Lennon’s death, an essay that Rushie himself invokes. The author of that piece made a point of not using the name of the nobody who shot Lennon five times in the back. He found highly obnoxious the notion that an assassin could become an instant member of a legend, in this case a pop-culture legend, simply by having carried out a cowardly and senseless act. Lennon’s killer does not deserve to be a celebrity, to be part of the same “club” as the Beatle whose life he took, and neither does Salman Rushdie’s would-be slayer.

Rushdie makes much of a fact that emerged as police questioned the perpetrator. The attacker had never read The Satanic Verses or more than a page or two of Rushdie’s other writings. To the would-be killer’s retarded and warped sensibility, what he had heard about Rushdie was enough to justify homicide and he did not need to do any research of his own. No doubt most readers will react to this information with rightful shock and incredulity, yet it would be hard to find a habit of thought–or anti-thought–more characteristic of the times in which we live.

Professors and politicians who set foot on a campus and find themselves under fierce verbal and sometimes physical attack, typically justified on the grounds that they purvey “dangerous” rhetoric, know all too well what it is to have people pre-judge you and write you off without taking the trouble to try to understand your ideas or know anything about you.

Here, then, is an aspect of this sordid and tragic affair that illustrates perfectly the theme captured in one of Rushdie’s most eloquent collections, East/West. Whether you look at the murderous hatreds that drive a small but determined minority of Islamist extremists, or what Rushdie himself in this book calls the bien-pensant tendencies of the contemporary highly tolerant Left, the same phenomenon is on display. Do not engage with ideas or theories or narratives that your visceral sense tells you are uncongenial to your own beliefs and values and therefore have no right to exist. Censor, deplatform, deny the freedom to speak or write or manifest any intellectual curiosity about the world. Knife is a book that everyone on the planet should read.