Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushie
When Booker Prize winning novelist Salman Rushdie published
The Satanic Verses, he offended in great numbers defenders of the Muslim religion and the Qur'an who saw the novel as a blasphemy against the prophet Muhammad and Muslim beliefs in general. In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini, then leader of Iran, issued a
fatwah (a formal and binding ruling based on Islamic law) calling for the death of Rushdie and the book's publishers. While Rushdie received many threats over the years, it wasn't until 2022 that a religious fanatic, referred in the book as simply "the A," attempted to actually kill him during a knife attack while he was on stage speaking at a literary conference. The book recounts in detail the attack in which he was stabbed 15 times, the author's long process of recovery, and Rushdie's various thoughts about the assassination attempt's significance personally and socially. He includes a section where he creates what a likely conversation between him and his would-be assassin might have sounded like. Given the subject matter of
Knife, the memoir is a rather restrained and succinct effort, an extremely rational and articulate man looking as clearly as possible at a supremely irrational event that happened to himself.
There are, of course, omissions, understandable ones. There is no discussion of what in
The Satanic Verses caused such a violent response in the Muslim world. Allegedly Rushdie believed that a few mullahs would be pissed off at him for a couple of months, but that whatever controversy that arose, it would blow away soon enough. I never got beyond eighty pages of
The Satanic Verses, but it seems a bit naive that he wouldn't have realized the nature and depth of the offences with which he was flirting. I am not suggesting in any way, shape or form that
fatwahs are an acceptable response to literary controversy--the whole notion is abhorrent and barbaric--but Rushdie is a smart guy; he should have known what he was risking. That being said, though, no one's life should be threatened by what they write in a book--about anything or anyone. Rushdie is the victim here, and his comments about what happened and its immediate and long-term aftermath are candid and revealing in a way that lesser writers might well have struggled to achieve.