In his book “The Knife,” Salman Rushdie recounts the attack that nearly cost him his life

Published on: 04/16/2024 – 07:40

3 minutes

Regaining “control of the story” after a knife attack that nearly cost him his life. In his memoir, “The Knife,” which will be published on Tuesday, April 16, writer Salman Rushdie recounts the attack that nearly killed him in 2022.

One summer day, in the middle of a literary conference on the banks of the American Great Lakes, upstate New York, a man rushes towards Salman Rushdie. He stabbed him several times with a knife, resulting in serious injuries to his face, neck and abdomen. The writer, in particular, lost sight in one eye.

“The book, in itself, is about a knife, but in itself it’s a bit like a knife. I don’t have any guns or knives, so this is the tool that I use. And I thought I would use it to fight. I thought I would use it to fight,” the Indian-born British-American explained to the American broadcaster ABC. “It became my way of controlling the narrative, so to speak.”

The man who turns his life upside down is a young American of Lebanese origin, sympathetic to the Islamic Republic of Iran. A “brutal” reminder of the fatwa issued by Tehran in 1989, the novelist announced last October, during the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany.

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The writer ignited part of the Islamic world by publishing his book “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, which prompted the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination. For a long time he was forced to live in hiding and under police protection, moving from hiding place to hiding place.

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“He and I spent 27 seconds together.”

The fatwa condemning the novelist to death was never lifted. Before the attack on him, many of the translators of his book were attacked. One was even killed: Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, who was stabbed several times in 1991.

Over the years, Salman Rushdie has told ABC that he believes the threat has finally disappeared.

However, he told CBS’s “60 Minutes” that he had a nightmare that turned out to be a foreshadowing, just days before the convention. In this dream, someone attacked him with a spear in the Roman amphitheater. He was shaken, and considered giving up on going to the festival, before changing his mind.

He says that he did not mention the name of his attacker in his book. “He and I spent 27 seconds together,” the duration of the attack, he told CBS. “That’s it. No need to give him any more of my time.”

“It became a book I really wanted to write.”

Regarding the attack itself, Salman Rushdie recalls, in an excerpt from his memoirs reported by The Guardian, that he thought he was dying.

He wrote that it was not “particularly dramatic or horrific,” but rather “realistic.” But he felt “deeply lonely” at the thought that he was dying far from his loved ones.

He initially explained to CBS that he did not even want to write about the attack, so as not to limit it to that event because he might have done so after the “Satanic Verses” and the fatwa.

“But it became clear that I couldn’t write anything else. I had to write about this first,” he said. “And then it became the book I really wanted to write.”

Today, he wants to believe that the attack he survived will be the end of a long and painful saga.

“I hope this is the final development in this story,” he said.

With Agence France-Presse