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Salman Rushdie was savagely attacked by a knife-wielding fanatic and stabbed repeatedly. He was close to death, and came back through surgical skill and the intense love of his wife. He applies the lessons of his attack to the despair facing our own age, and offers the strength of “art”, which outlasts empires and persecution.
In his new book “Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder,” Rushdie chooses not to inflate the importance of the attacker or his cause. Through the book whenever he refers to the attacker, he calls him “A” - short for Ass****. He also does not expand on A’s reason for the attack, which was confused in A’s shallow mind. It may have been somehow tied to a fatwa - religious ruling or duty - some 30 years ago, for Muslims to kill Rushdie. Though the fatwa was rescinded, to the very religious a fatwa cannot be withdrawn. It was issued by Iran’s religious leader Ruhollah Khomeini, for references to passages allegedly in the Qur’an in which Mohammed praised a pagan goddess (“The Satanic Verses”). The artistic community was outraged over the fatwa, with people taking the stance that "Intransigence is never so great as when it feels it has a god on its side."
Rushdie is an atheist, as you might have gathered.
On August 12, 2022 he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, Here is his account of the 27 seconds that left him with 14 stab wounds and a cold brush with death:
I can still see the moment in slow motion. My eyes follow the running man as he leaps out of the audience and approaches me, I see each step of his headlong run. I watch myself coming to my feet and turning toward him. (I continue to face him. I never turn my back on him. There are no injuries on my back. I raise my left hand in self-defense. He plunges the knife into it. After that there are many blows, to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere. I feel my legs give way, and I fall.
This “A” didn’t bother to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill. By his own admission, he read barely two pages of my writing. Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.
It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses.
In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense. That was the cage into which the knife wanted to put me.
Violence came running at me and my reality fell apart. It is perhaps not very surprising that in the few seconds available to me, I didn’t know what to do.
I felt him hit me very hard on the right side of my jaw. He’s broken it, I remember thinking ‘All my teeth will fall out.’ At first I thought I’d just been hit by someone who really packed a punch. (I learned later that he had been taking boxing lessons.) Now I know there was a knife in that fist. Blood began to pour out of my neck.
There were deep knife wound in my left hand, which severed all the tendons and most of the nerves. Deep stab wounds in my neck — one slash right across it and more on the right side — and another farther up my face, also on the right. If I look at my chest now, I see a line of wounds down the center, two more slashes on the lower right side, and a cut on my upper right thigh. And there’s a wound on the left side of my mouth, and there was one along my hairline too.
And there was the knife in the eye. That was the cruelest blow, and it was a deep wound. The blade went in all the way to the optic nerve, which meant there would be no possibility of saving the vision. It was gone. He was just stabbing wildly.
His friend Henry Reese is in his seventies. The A. was twenty-four, armed, and bent on murder. Yet Henry rushed across the stage at him and grabbed him; others in the audience were right behind. They charged into danger for their friend…
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