Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

It had been thirty-three and a half years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order against me and all those involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, and during those years, I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are.

Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don’t now remember much about ZAMM, as it was known—I don’t really care about motorcycles or Zen Buddhism either—but I remember liking the strange word, and liking, too, the notion of the meetings, “Chautauquas,” at which ideas were debated in an atmosphere of tolerance, openness, and freedom.

In death we are all yesterday’s people, trapped forever in the past tense. That was the cage into which the knife wanted to put me.

This is as close to understanding my inaction as I’ve been able to get: the targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real.

An intimacy of strangers. That’s a phrase I’ve sometimes used to express the joyful thing that happens in the act of reading, that happy union of the interior lives of author and reader.

as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived. In Machado de Assis’s wonderful Brazilian novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, the eponymous hero confides that he is telling his story from beyond the grave. He doesn’t explain how, and this is a trick I haven’t learned.

Let me say this right up front: I am proud of the work I’ve done, and that very much includes The Satanic Verses. If anyone’s looking for remorse, you can stop reading right here. My novels can take care of themselves.

Grace Paley got angry with Norman for putting too few women on the panels, and Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag disagreed with Grace because “literature is not an equal opportunity employer”—and

I was absolutely not looking for romance. In fact, I was actively, determinedly, not looking for it. And then it came up behind me and whacked me behind the ear and I was powerless to resist.

Maybe I’ll just go home. They said they were going up to the party and coaxed me to come, even briefly. I hemmed and hawed a bit and then agreed. On such coin-toss moments a life can turn. Chance determines our fates at least as profoundly as choice, or those nonexistent notions karma, qismat, “destiny.”

Happy was Henry’s nature, the nature of a human being whose happiness had never been sabotaged, and who thought himself entitled to its pursuit, as the Declaration had assured him long before he was born.

There is a kind of deep happiness that prefers privacy, that flourishes out of the public eye, that does not require the validation of being known about: a happiness that is for the happy people alone, that is, just by itself, enough.

Leach delivered the BBC’s prestigious Reith Lectures on the radio. They became notorious for one sentence. This was it: “The family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.” Nineteen sixty-seven wasn’t a good year for the idea of the family, as a young generation—my generation—either turned on, tuned in, and dropped out,

In his great book If This Is a Man, Primo Levi tells us that “perfect happiness is not attainable,” but, he proposes, nor is perfect unhappiness.

I wasn’t dead. I was in surgery, with multiple surgeons working on different wounded parts of me simultaneously. My neck, my right eye, my left hand, my liver, my abdomen. The slash wounds on my face—my forehead, cheeks, and mouth—and on my chest. The surgery took something like eight hours. At the end of it, I was on a ventilator, but I wasn’t dead. I was alive.

When Death comes very close to you, the rest of the world goes far away and you can feel a great loneliness. At such a time kind words are comforting and strengthening. They make you feel that you’re not alone, that maybe you haven’t lived and worked in vain.

Protecting the rights and sensibilities of groups perceived as vulnerable would take precedence over freedom of speech, which the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti had called “the tongue set free.” This move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of the Constitution to be co-opted by the right.

What makes hospitals happiest is when the patient says he is having bowel movements.

Every day I was a little more able to do things for myself. The day I was able to make it to the toilet, do my good-patient business of emptying my bowels, and then clean myself without a nurse’s help—well, that felt like a liberation. I had been terrified that I would be the kind of invalid who needs someone to wipe him, to wash him, to treat him like a baby. I began, just a little, to think I might soon be a grown-up once again.

Gumption, Pirsig tells us in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is what the spirit needs to get itself into a good place, and the spirit acquires gumption by being in contact with Quality:

There were probably exceptions to this principle, but very few of the people who ought to regret their lives—Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Adolf Eichmann, Harvey Weinstein—ever do so.

Written by someone living in a small leftist bubble.

Another case of iatrogenic disorderliness. Once again, medication had made me sick.

I only want to suggest that when the Archangel understood the Word of God and brought it to the Messenger in a way that the Messenger could understand, he was translating it. God communicated in the way that God communicates, which is so far above human understanding that we cannot even begin to comprehend it, and the Angel made it comprehensible to the Messenger, by delivering it in human speech, which is not the speech of God.

They say everything can be interpreted, even the Book. It can be interpreted according to the times in which the interpreter lives. Literalism is a mistake.

Those who knew you were surprised by what you did. The murderer in you had not previously shown his face. That virgin self needed four years of Imam Yutubi to become what he, what you, became.

art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature.

By the time we returned to New York I thought I was pretty clear that this was what my second chance at life should concentrate on: love, and work.

the weaponizing of Islam around the world has led directly to the terror reigns of the Taliban and the ayatollahs, to the stifling society of Saudi Arabia, to the knife attack against Naguib Mahfouz, to the assaults on free thought and the oppression of women in many Islamic states, and, to be personal, to the attack against me.

God did not hand down morality to us. We created God to embody our moral instincts.

Even on this blue-sky day, I knew it was not the cloudless thing we had known before. It was a wounded happiness, and there was, and perhaps always would be, a shadow in the corner of it. But it was a strong happiness nevertheless, and as we embraced, I knew it would be enough.