Salman Rushdie recounts getting stabbed (2024)
In a Nutshell
Salman Rushdie, 76, survived a 27-second knife attack in August 2022 at a New York literary festival that cost him his right eye and left 15 wounds; the attacker was a 24-year-old New Jersey man who admitted he had barely read *The Satanic Verses* yet acted on the 1989 fatwa. Rushdie refuses to name his assailant and instead uses the memoir *Knife* to reclaim the narrative, treating language itself as the weapon he wielded in response. Nearly two years later, he lives with the lingering “shadow” of death but insists the attack was the final convulsion of a decades-old story, not its redefinition.
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Salman Rushdie had been a marked man for nearly half his life. In 1989, Iran's leader Ayatollah Khomeini declared his novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous, an insult to Islam, and called for the Indian-born writer's assassination. Rushdie went into hiding with around-the-clock police protection for 10 years. He eventually moved to the US and thought he was safe. In August 2022, as he was about to speak at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife. Rushdie, who's now 76, lost his right eye and came close to dying. He's come to terms with the attempt on his life by writing a book about it called Knife, which comes out Tuesday. This is his first television interview since the attack.
Rushdie had a dream two days before the attack. He had a premonition dream of being attacked in an amphitheater, a kind of Roman Empire dream as if he was in the coliseum and somebody with a spear was stabbing downwards while he was rolling around on the floor trying to get away. He woke up quite shaken by it. He had to go to Chautauqua and said to his wife Eliza that he didn't want to go because of the dream. Then he thought, "don't be silly, it's a dream."
Rushdie had been invited to the town of Chautauqua, close to Lake Erie, to speak about a subject he knows all too well: the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat. He did not have any anxiety being in such a public space because in the more than 20 years that he's been living in America, he's done a lot of these things. He hadn't had security around him, a close protection detail, for a long time. In many places that he goes to lecture, they're used to having a certain degree of security, venue security, but in this case there wasn't any. The irony is that he was there to talk about writers in danger and the need for writers from other countries to have safe spaces in America, and it turned out not to be a safe space for him.
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