With this book, Rushdie admits he learned nothing from the fatwa calling for his death.
With a title like Knife, Salman Rushdie’s account about his near-fatal stabbing in rural New York at the hands of a Hezbollah-supporting jihadist on August 12, 2022, might expect ideas how to respond to Islamist violence in Western democracies. Instead, Rushdie reveals that he learned next-to-nothing from his years surrounded by men “willing to take a bullet for him” after Ayatollah Khomeini, outraged over the publication of Satanic Verses, issued an edict in 1989 calling for his death. It’s a stunning revelation coming from the man who in 2012 wrote a 633-page book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, about his years in hiding.
Rushdie admits that as the attack unfolded, he stood onstage “like a pinata” and “didn’t make the slightest attempt to defend” himself. He wonders if he was fatalistically “prepared to simply surrender” to his murderer. “On that beautiful morning in that attractive setting, violence came running at me and my reality fell apart.”
No, not “reality”; rather, a forgetful fantasy fell apart. A bounty worth almost $3 million had been on his head for more than 30 years, one of his translators had been murdered, and there he sat on the stage with “no visible security.”
A close reading of Knife reveals that Rushdie wanted to be the nice, liberal, good guy who hates Donald Trump, guns, and right-wingers – even if that means offering himself to be stabbed. He would rather be dead saying the right things than be alive and supporting those polices that would protect him.
Rushdie meditates on how the knife used to stab him could have been used for another legitimate, innocent purpose, like cutting a wedding cake, and that it is the misuse of the knife, and not the knife itself, that is immoral. But then he catches himself, realizing this is akin to the hated right-wing refrain that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” He evades this conundrum by noting that guns, unlike knives, have only one purpose—to kill. “You couldn’t cut a cake with a Glock.” No, but a gun could have saved him from his would-be assassin. For that to happen, Rushdie would have to abandon the world of magical realism, apparently his preferred domain.
Rushdie has meditated on guns before, in Joseph Anton, where he recounts how that his bodyguards offered to “arrange for him to be given shooting lessons” but he “thought about it long and hard and said no …, thanks all the same. … Better to live without it and hope the bad guys wouldn’t get that close.” Thirty-five years after the edict, Rushdie remains trapped in his own world of magical realism.
