Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare’s Iago which Coleridge called “motiveless Malignity”—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.

Even Boris Johnson, then the British prime minister, who had once written an article saying that I didn’t deserve the knighthood I had received in June 2007 “for services to literature” because I wasn’t a good enough writer, now found some grudging platitudes. India, the country of my birth and my deepest inspiration, on that day found no words. And, inevitably, there were voices expressing pleasure about what had happened. If you are turned into an object of hate, there will be people who hate you. That had been true for thirty-four years.

To regret what your life has been is the true folly, I told myself, because the person doing the regretting has been shaped by the life he subsequently regrets.

Eliza asked me to talk to her camera about The Satanic Verses. When I started writing that book, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t allowed to do it. I had these stories I wanted to tell and I was trying to work out how to tell them. That was all I was doing.

I watched them playing cards with their artsy-filmi crowd, speaking in even more outrageous language about everything and nothing, and laughing even more uproariously than my parents’ friends. These settings were where I learned the first lesson of free expression—that you must take it for granted. If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free. When I was making The Satanic Verses, it never occurred to me to be afraid.)

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus Caesar, but the poetry of Ovid has outlasted the Roman Empire. The poet Mandelstam’s life was ruined by Joseph Stalin, but his poetry has outlasted the Soviet Union.

I have never felt the need for religious faith to help me comprehend and deal with the world. However, I understand that for many people religion provides a moral anchor and seems essential. And in my view, the private faith of anyone is nobody’s business except that of the individual concerned. I have no issue with religion when it occupies this private space and doesn’t seek to impose its values on others. But when religion becomes politicized, even weaponized, then it’s everybody’s business, because of its capacity for harm.

What I cared about now was continuing, writing the next chapter in the book of life. The attack felt like a large red ink blot spilled over an earlier page. It was ugly, but it didn’t ruin the book. One could turn the page, and go on.

Perhaps, in the incarcerated decades that stretch out before you, you will learn introspection, and come to understand that you did something wrong. But you know what? I don’t care. This, I think, is what I have come to this courtroom to say to you. I don’t care about you, or the ideology that you claim to represent, and which you represent so poorly. I have my life, and my work, and there are people who love me. I care about those things.