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. It is said that Henry James’s last words were “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.” Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic.

This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveler, a murderous ghost from the past.

We know that the happy man by the lake is in mortal danger. He has no idea, which makes our fear for him even greater. This is the literary device known as foreshadowing. One of the most celebrated examples of it is the famous beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad…” When we as readers know what the character can’t know, we want to warn them. Run, Anne Frank, they will discover your hiding place tomorrow. As I think about that last carefree night, the shadow of the future falls across my memory. But I can’t warn myself. Too late for that. I can only tell the story.

Violence smashes that picture. Suddenly they don’t know the rules—what to say, how to behave, what choices to make. They no longer know the shape of things. Reality dissolves and is replaced by the incomprehensible. Fear, panic, paralysis take over from rational thought. “Thinking straight” becomes impossible, because in the presence of violence people no longer know what “thinking straight” might be. They—we—become destabilized, even deranged. Our minds no longer know how to work.

And so that Chautauqua morning I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. 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.

A gunshot is action at a distance, but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy, a knife’s a close-up weapon, and the crimes it commits are intimate encounters.

In the presence of serious injuries, your body’s privacy ceases to exist, you lose autonomy over your physical self, over the vessel in which you sail. You allow this because you have no alternative. You surrender the captaincy of your ship so that it won’t sink. You allow people to do what they will with your body—to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness—so that you can live.

However, as the attentive reader will have guessed, I survived.

When I think about that now, I’m shaken. I don’t usually think of my books as prophecies. I’ve had some trouble with prophets in my life, and I’m not applying for the job. But it’s hard, thinking back to the genesis of that novel, not to see the image as—at the very least—a foreshadowing.

I no longer feel the slightest urge to defend the novel or myself. The essays “In Good Faith” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” and the memoir Joseph Anton contain everything I have to say on those subjects. For the rest, I am content to be judged by the books I’ve written and the life I’ve lived. 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.

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.”

“Henry White was white and happy. For a long time there was nothing more to say about him. All around him were people with unhappinesses worth talking about, but Henry was contented, and therefore a kind of blank. Nobody knew what to make of him. He had been white and happy since the day he was born. However, he did not think of himself as white, because white was the color of people who didn’t think it was important to think about their color, because they were just people; color was for other people to think about, people who weren’t just people. 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.

maybe all happiness, was a form of simpleton insanity. A delusion. The world is monstrous, so happiness is a lie.

“The family, with its narrow privacy and tawdry secrets, is the source of all our discontents.”

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.

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.

When the faithful believe that what they believe must be forced upon others who do not believe it, or when they believe that nonbelievers should be prevented from the robust or humorous expression of their nonbelief, then there’s a problem.

I have long thought of this hypothetical past as something like the childhood of the human race, when those distant relatives of ours needed gods in the way that children need parents, to explain their own existence and to give them rules and boundaries within which to grow up. But the time comes when we must grow up—or ought to, because for many people that time still hasn’t come.

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

“Religion, an ancient form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. Religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.”