Author Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for his assassination in 1989, declaring Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” blasphemous and insulting to Islam. After 10 years, Rushdie came out of hiding and moved to the United States, where he feels safe. Then, on August 12, 2022, at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, he was attacked by a knife-wielding assailant. Rushdie was stabbed 15 times and nearly died. He lost his right eye in the attack. He came to terms with the attempt on his life the only way he knows how: by writing about it in his new book. “Knife” comes out this week.
Rushdie read several excerpts from “Knife” over 60 minutes.
“I would respond to violence with art,” says author Salman Rushdie. He initially didn’t want to write his new book “Knife” about the attack, but he felt he had to take ownership of what happened, refusing to be a victim.
“No matter what I have already written or what I might write now, I will always be the one who was stabbed. The knife defines me. I will fight a battle against it, but I think I will lose,” writes- he.
“There was nothing supernatural about it. No ‘tunnel of light’. No feeling of coming out of my body,” Rushdie writes, describing his near-death experience in 2022 in his new book. “In fact, I have rarely felt so strongly connected to my body. My body was dying and it was taking me with it.”
“I don’t want to use his name in this story,” the author writes of his 24-year-old attacker. In “Knife,” Rushdie calls the attacker “the A.” After the attack, he learned that the attacker had only read a few pages of his book, “The Satanic Verses,” according to the New York Post.
“So it’s you. You’re here.” These were Rushdie’s first thoughts as a man armed with a knife rushed towards him before stabbing him.
“It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come to pass at last, the genteel thing.’ Death was approaching me too, but it didn’t seem as genteel to me, it seemed anachronistic to me,” Rushdie says.
Chatting with 60 Minutes’ Anderson Cooper, Rushdie explained, “It was like something was coming out of the distant past. And trying to take me back in time.”
“There was the knife in the eye. It was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went right up to the optic nerve, which meant there was no no possibility of saving the vision It was gone,” writes Rushdie.
After being stabbed 15 times, Salman Rushdie’s face was lacerated. In his new book “Knife,” he writes that his face looked like “a special effect from a science fiction movie.” He describes his eye as popping out of its socket and hanging on his face like a large boiled egg. He writes: “The swelling was so severe that the doctors didn’t even know for the first few days if I still had an eyelid. (I did.)”
In the days following the attack, he did not recognize his own reflection. “The lips of the man in the mirror do not move. There is a gash on the top of his forehead,” Rushdie writes. “Now he is the man beyond the looking glass and the looking glass is behind him and dark. He is the outsider who must play his part.”
If Salman Rushdie testifies in court against his attacker, this is what he plans to say: “I find that I have very little to say to you. Our lives touched for a moment and then separated. Mine separated. has improved since that day, while yours has deteriorated. You made a bad bet and you lost.
“The last thing my right eye could see: I saw the man in black running towards me from the right side of the seating area. Black clothes, black mask. He was coming hard and low,” Rushdie writes in his new book, “Knife”. “I didn’t try to run. I was fascinated.”
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