‘So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.’
‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’ by the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie is an extraordinary book; not least because it is a miracle that Rushdie survived to write it. Rushdie doesn’t believe in miracles, but admits that his books always have – perhaps his books saved him, he muses, in this memoir of the stabbing he endured in 2022. He has lived in the shadow of the possibility of just such an act since 1989, Iran’s then supreme leader pronouncing a Fatwa, a death sentence, on Rushdie.
‘However, as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived.’
I was just old enough to remember the original Fatwa, this attack on freedom of speech – on the ability of a great writer to write the books he wants to write.
So, it gave me great satisfaction to read ‘Knife’, this account of his against the odds survival. I can only hope that the regime that tried to silence him will finally meet its end instead.
I close with a video of U2’s ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ with lyrics written by Rushdie, taken from his 1999 novel of the same name. He even appears in a cameo:
