Salman Rushdie on watching himself being stabbed: ‘Triggering? That’s a little too military for my liking’

By the late summer of 2022 Salman Rushdie had become relatively relaxed about the threats put his way following the publication of his book The Satanic Verses, 34 years earlier. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, had, in response to supposedly disrespectful depictions of the prophet Muhammad, issued a fatwa calling for the author’s death. Numerous appalling acts of violence followed. Rushdie went into hiding. The literary world shuddered.As the new century loomed, the peril seemed to be receding. In September 1998, as the Iranian government sought to restore diplomatic relations with the UK, Mohammad Khatami, the Islamic state’s then president, declared Iran would “neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie”. You take what you can get.Four years ago the author approached a public interview in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, with some confidence. It seemed as if the nightmare was over.READ MORE“Well, I had pretty much thought that. Because it had been over for more than two decades,” Rushdie, author of the immortal Midnight’s Children, says.We know what happened. A man later identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar rushed on to the stage and stabbed the author frequently and with great ferocity. Rushdie received wounds to the face, liver and hand. He ended up losing his right eye.“I moved to New York at the beginning of the year 2000. And from that date until the date of the attack, in 2022, I’d really been leading a perfectly normal writer’s life,” he says. “You know? Doing the kinds of things that writers do: writing books, doing readings, giving lectures. I must have done hundreds of public appearances without there ever being a hint of a problem.”Hadi Matar is led in to court. Photograph: Adrian Kraus/AP The opaque right lens on his spectacles speaks to one lasting legacy of the attack, but Rushdie looks reasonably spry for a man late into his eighth decade. I am obliged to ask how he’s bearing up.“I’m pretty well, thank you,” he says. “It’s been more than four years, and I’ve had quite a long recovery period.”[ Salman Rushdie: ‘I am stupidly optimistic – it got me through those bad years’Opens in new window ]But are there things he cannot do that he could do five years ago?“I can’t drive a car, for example. So the problems of having lost an eye are the obvious ones.”After such a horrific attack – he has talked about his “bulging boiled-egg eye” hanging out of his face – Rushdie could be forgiven for pushing the event into the mental background. But that is not how he operates. In 2024 he published a book about the attack titled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. That has now become a documentary from the prolific film-maker Alex Gibney. It transpired that Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rushdie’s wife since 2021, had been filming his recovery from the very start. Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie meshes that footage with archive material and contemporary interviews to striking effect.Did Rushdie have to be talked into the project?“It was kind of my idea. I was the one who said to my wife, Eliza, that we should make some sort of a record of this.“What I was saying was that she would take a picture on her iPhone every couple of days, so that we had a picture of what the injuries were and how the recovery was going, just for our own use.“But she had a better idea. Apart from being a wonderful writer, she’s also very professional photographer and videographer,” he says. So Griffiths asked a friend to go to their house and send her camera equipment to the hospital where Rushdie was being treated.They ended up spending a year chronicling his recovery. When Rushdie sat down and watched the footage, he realised that it didn’t “look like a home movie”, as it had been made with care and attention. Salman Rushdie and his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Gibney, director of such films as Taxi to the Dark Side and Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, came on board to shape it into its current compelling form. Was Rushdie able to rewatch footage of the actual attack? One could understand if he looked away at that point.[ Salman Rushdie: ‘The first thing that comes into my mind each morning is: I don’t have my right eye’Opens in new window ]“Yes. When we were making the documentary, for a long time we didn’t have that footage of the attack,” he says. “It hadn’t been made available to us because it was considered to be evidence. But eventually we did get the footage, and then Alex found his way of cutting it into the film, in a cross-cutting sequence, and we saw that final cut. “I think it was January 7th this year, which was about two weeks before it was premiered at Sundance. So the first time we saw that footage was when Eliza and I went to watch the final cut.”He pauses.“It was not an easy watch.”The word “triggering” is often misused now. But it was once helpful as a way of describing how reminders of such trauma can reignite the anxiety and distress.“’Triggering’, yeah? Except that’s a little too military for my liking,” Rushdie says with his characteristic dry wit.[ Salman Rushdie in Dublin: ‘What happens when language does not work any more?’Opens in new window ]Rushdie would not wish to be defined by the fatwa or the recent assault. There is no risk of that. Born in Mumbai 79 years ago, he attended Rugby School, in Warwickshire in England, before moving on to King’s College, Cambridge. By the late 1970s he was part of a thrilling cadre of youngish novelists that included the likes of Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. His second novel, the raucous, Dickensian, endlessly rereadable Midnight’s Children, became a sensation on publication in 1981. It won the Booker Prize and two subsequent “Booker of Bookers” on the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the award. Fine novels such as Shame, The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet followed.I own up to having consulted Rushdie’s Wikipedia page. The entry tells us we are about to read about “an Indian-born British and American novelist”. That is an interestingly structured phrase. He is British and American but merely “Indian-born”. What does he make of that?“This has been my life,” he says. “I am ethnically Indian. Both my parents were Indian. I was born and raised in India. Then I spent a long time in England, and now I’ve spent something like 25 or 26 years based in New York. “So I belong to a lot of places. I have envied those writers who were deeply rooted in one place and have made a lifetime’s work out of it. Someone like William Faulkner. But that’s not been my fortune. But then that gives me a lot more of the world to write about. So, I think, in the end you make the best of the hand you’re dealt.”The film digs out footage of Rushdie discussing an unhappy time at Rugby. He seemed to have a good handle on whether he then fitted into the establishment. He had been to a major public school and Oxford, but that may not quite have made up for his origins in Asia. Was he an outsider? Was he an insider? What does Sir Salman Rushdie make of that question now?“I was very unhappy at Rugby,” he says. “I was certainly made to feel like an outsider when I was there. I think I put down roots in cities rather than countries. I’ve lived in New York for a quarter of a century. I think one of the great things about New York is that it accepts you very easily. You arrive and put down your bags and you’re a New Yorker – as the Sinatra song promises.”I can understand that notion of connecting with cities rather than countries. You can be an uncontested Londoner or New Yorker without being, respectively, English or American.“Exactly. In New York you hear every language in the world just walking down the street.”Rushdie can take some credit for bringing new, livelier energies into British literature. His books are home to fantasy, surrealism and grand gestures to parallel worlds. He also helped open up that scene to other cultures, but it would be wrong to suggest he was then the only person of colour at the top table.“It was beginning to change then in the late 1970s and the 1980s,” he says. “There was me and there was [Kazuo] Ishiguro and there was Timothy Mo and there was Caryl Phillips. It was getting to be quite diverse in a way that the previous generation – the generation of the 1950s and 1960s – had not been. That was almost entirely a white literary scene, with maybe [VS] Naipaul as the one exception.”What does he make of the way Midnight’s Children has endured? Following an emblematic hero, born at the stroke of Indian independence, the book, as those retrospective Bookers attest, continues to be read by successive generations. It is a contemporary classic.“I’m just very pleased,” he says. “You never know if your work is going to speak to people who weren’t alive when you wrote it. But it seems to still have meaning for young readers nowadays. That’s why people like me, we in a way write for the future as well as for the present. You want your books to endure, and you want them to have a life longer than your own.”Salman Rushdie holding his book The Satanic Verses. Photograph: Derek Hudson/Getty There is no getting away from the grim fact that Rushdie’s life is more or less bisected by the fatwa. The Satanic Verses, an endlessly rich magic-realist text, was criticised for supposed blasphemies against Islam that have been chewed over ever since. It took a while for the full force of the objections to manifest themselves. The book won the Whitbread Prize. It was a Booker nominee (losing to Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda). The grand US critic Harold Bloom called it “Rushdie’s largest aesthetic achievement”. Everything changed when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his dictate. Suddenly young men, few of whom had read the novel, were burning it theatrically in public places.Rushdie has been asked this a thousand times, but we can ask it once more. Was he surprised by the response? He can’t have imagined the reaction would send him into hiding for years.Iranian women hold banners reading 'Kill Salman Rushdie' in 1989 during a demonstration in Tehran against the author of The Satanic Verses. Photograph: Norbert Schiller/AFP via Getty “I didn’t. I hadn’t anticipated violence. I had thought probably people of conventional religious belief might not like my take and they might express that,” he says. “The book came out in England, in the British edition, in September of 1988. That was six months before the fatwa. And in those six months there was disagreement. “I was joining in. I would go on radio and TV and argue. And I thought, here’s a thing a book can do that might actually be valuable, which is to start interesting arguments.” All very civilised. All very useful.“I thought, we’ll have this argument, and then it’ll be time for the next book. And I think that is what would have happened if Khomeini hadn’t jumped in. Because that changed the subject. Instead of being a disagreement about a book it became a question of international terrorism.”Little of which actually touched on the text of The Satanic Verses.“No, I don’t think Khomeini ever saw a copy of the book,” he says with a sigh.[ Fintan O’Toole: The first time I met Salman Rushdie, the very idea of it was unimaginableOpens in new window ]The film reveals the worldwide mayhem that ensued in the aftermath of the fatwa. In 1991 Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed to death at the University of Tsukuba. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, survived another savage stabbing, in Milan. William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher, also escaped with his life after being shot three times in the back. Rushdie continued to write under protection until that apparent thaw set in as the new millennium approached.“I told myself very early that there are various ways in which that event could have destroyed me as a writer,” he says. “It could either have scared me, and then I would write frightened books, or it could have possessed me with rage, and I would write revenge books.”That didn’t happen. The Moor’s Last Sigh, from 1995, is a beautiful dream of a book. He tells me that the response to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a children’s book published two years after The Satanic Verses, is among his proudest achievements. He delights in hearing that its original readers are now reading it to their own children.“Put it like this,” he says. “If you just arrived from the moon or somewhere, and you knew nothing about me except the sequence of my books in chronological order, I don’t think you would think something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.”The 2022 attack doesn’t seem to have turned him bitter either. “The amazing piece of good fortune was that the knife went deep enough to cut the optic nerve,” he says. “And, as you know, the optic nerve is about a millimetre from the brain. And it didn’t touch the brain. “One of the things I had to do in hospital was to have, I think, three brain scans. They told me, to my enormous relief, that there was no brain damage. I think that’s the luckiest escape of all.”It is funny how we view luck. Rushdie was most unfortunate to go through any of these traumas. But he was lucky the knife didn’t graze his brain.He smiles slyly and nearly chuckles.“It’s very odd. Obviously, I’d rather have my right eye.”Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is in cinemas from Friday, October 2nd