Salman Rushdie (pictured) has revealed he thought the fatal fatwa from Iran was being carried out when he was attacked with a knife at a New York book fair. The 76-year-old author thought he was going to die during the assassination attempt on the stage of the literary festival on August 12, 2022.
Mr Rushdie lost sight in his right eye in the brutal 27-second assault that also left him with stab wounds to the face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand. The publication of his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, drew heavy criticism for the suggested contradiction of the prophet Mohammed’s infallibility and was banned in a number of countries.
Then in 1989, the then supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared a $3million fatwa contract on his life for the ‘blasphemy’ contained in the book, which sent the writer into hiding for 10 years. Now, Mr Rushdie explained that his ‘first thought’ when he saw the would-be assassin approaching him was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are’.
He also said the attack still ‘upsets me every day’ as he prepares to see his account of it published in ‘Knife’, his 22nd book, on Tuesday. He said: ‘I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way,’ he wrote. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, “So it’s you. Here you are”.’ Before the 2022 knife attack, Mr Rushdie’s police minders alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts from state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998. But the fatwa remains in place and a lone wolf nearly claimed the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.
He nearly pulled out after having a dream two nights earlier in which he was being violently attacked. Perhaps spurred unconsciously by the venue’s name, he found himself dreaming that he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena. ‘It was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him,’ he told CBS. The dream was so vivid he thrashed around in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to wake him in turn and reassure him. ‘I was quite shaken by it,’ he told the BBC, ‘and I said to Eliza, I don’t want to go. ‘And then you wake up a bit more, and you think, it’s just a dream, and you’re not going to allow your life to be ruled by something that happened in a dream. And so I thought, I’ll go. It’s a gig.’
He brushed his fears aside but discovered that there was no security as he took to the stage to deliver a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat. ‘In the corner of my right eye — the last thing my right eye would ever see — I saw the man in black running towards me down the right-hand side of the seating area,’ he writes in his book.
But he did not see the knife and thought, at first, that he’d just been punched. ‘I think he was just wildly, you know, flailing around,’ Rushdie said. But then he saw a pool of blood ‘spreading out from my body’, and realized that his right eye was ‘kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I’ve said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind’. ‘I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like I was terrified of it or whatever.’
It was 27 seconds before festival staff managed to pull the attacker off the then 75-year-old. Mr Rushdie said: ‘That’s quite a long time. That’s the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, in which life meets death.’ The author was airlifted to hospital where he underwent eight hours of emergency surgery before being placed on a ventilator, unable to speak. He said he felt a ‘profound sense of loneliness’ at the prospect of dying away from his family, but recovered because ‘A part of me, some battling part deep within simply had no plan to die’. After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged. One of his surgeons told him that he was both really unlucky and really lucky. ‘I said, “What’s the lucky part?” And he said, “Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife”,’ Rushdie said.
His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar (pictured), 24, was dragged off the stage by stewards and has been held without bail at the Chautauqua County Jail as he awaits trial. Born in California to Lebanese parents he was found with a false driving license in the name of two Hezbollah commanders when he was seized, admitting he had only read two pages of the book which had so outraged the Iranian clerics. Mr Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he eventually comes to trial but has refused to name him in his new book. ‘He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That’s it,’ Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper . ‘I don’t need to give him any more of my time.’
The author has always fought against being defined by the attempts on his life and was reluctant to turn his pen on the attack that nearly killed him until he decided it might help him come to terms with it. ‘I need to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,’ he said. ‘And the moment I thought that, kinda something changed in my head. And it then became a book I really very much wanted to write. ‘I mean, language is a way of breaking open the world. I don’t have any other weapons.’ And he said he realized that his slowly growing confidence in an ability to lead a normal life had been a mistake. ‘That sense of time warp, you know, of being dragged into a narrative that I thought had concluded, and then it turned out had not. ‘I think that shadow is just there, and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not. ‘I’m hoping this is just a last twitch of that story. I don’t know. I’ll let you know.’
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