Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder

by Salman Rushdie

first came across the word in 1974, around the time that I finished my first novel. It was in the cult-sensation book of that year, 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 the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the “Chautauqua movement” spread across America from the lakeside town, and Theodore Roosevelt called it “the most American thing in America.”

I felt the need to defend the text. In addition, many prominent and non-Muslim people had joined forces with the Islamist attack to say what a bad person I was, John Berger, Germaine Greer, President Jimmy Carter, Roald Dahl, and various British Tory grandees among them. Commentators such as the journalist Richard Littlejohn and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said they wouldn’t mind at all if I was attacked. (I’ve outlived Trevor-Roper, but I assume Littlejohn is feeling pretty satisfied now, wherever he is.)

In my essay collection Languages of Truth I wrote about the inspiration for and birth of the PEN America World Voices Festival. To avoid repeating myself, I’ll just say that if Norman Mailer hadn’t been president of PEN back in 1986—if he hadn’t raised a ton of money and invited a glittering array of the world’s greatest writers to New York City for that legendary Congress at which Günter Grass and Saul Bellow got angry with each other about poverty in the South Bronx, and John Updike used the little blue mailboxes of America as a metaphor of freedom and his coziness irritated a substantial segment of the audience, and Cynthia Ozick accused the Austrian ex-chancellor Bruno Kreisky (a Jew himself) of anti-Semitism because he had met with Yasser Arafat, and 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 if I hadn’t been the starstruck new kid on the block, if those wild days at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South hadn’t happened, I might never have had the notion of launching an international literary festival eighteen years later, in a city that had international festivals of everything, but not, until then, of literature. And if I hadn’t set about creating that festival with the help of PEN’s Mike Roberts and Esther Allen and many other PEN people, and if it hadn’t become the successful annual literary equivalent of bas...

The journey across the frontier from Poetryland into Proseville often seemed to go through Memoiristan. Memoirs in this literary moment have become a major art form, allowing our perceptions of the present to be remade through the personal life experiences, the extraordinary pasts, of memoirists. (Just one recent example might be Safiya Sinclair’s How to Say Babylon, a powerful, richly written memoir of growing up in Jamaica and needing to break away from a tyrannical Rastafarian father.)

we would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.

Guido d’Arezzo, who invented the modern system of musical notation, the staves and clefs and the rest of it. I corrected the proofs of Victory City, and it felt good.

Mughal mirror-tiled Sheesh Mahal at one time, and at another a stone-walled place with small barred windows. Something like Hagia Sophia in Istanbul was manifested to me by my unsettled brain, and the Alhambra, and Versailles; like Fatehpur Sikri and the Agra Red Fort and the Lake Palace of Udaipur; but also a darker version of El Escorial in Spain,

This move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of the Constitution to be co-opted by the right. The First Amendment was now what allowed conservatives to lie, to abuse, to denigrate. It became a kind of freedom for bigotry. The right had a new social agenda too, one that sounded a lot like an old one: authoritarianism, backed up by unscrupulous media, big money, complicit politicians, and corrupt judges. All of this, the complexities created by new ideas of right and wrong, and my desire to protect the idea of freedom—Thomas Paine’s idea, the Enlightenment idea, John Stuart Mill’s idea—from these new things, was beyond my power to articulate. My voice was weak and faint. My body was in shock. Talking about miracles was about as much as I could manage.

After the fatwa, and the subsequent decade of semi-underground life under police protection, I came close to losing myself again, and, for a while, I floundered. The danger was real; the widespread hostility was almost worse than that. The reason I was not only consoled by the flood of good feeling that came my way after the knife attack, but also surprised by it, was that after the fatwa there was some similar support, but also a hurtful quantity of sharp criticism. In the West there were many voices—not just the aforementioned Hugh Trevor-Roper, Richard Littlejohn, Jimmy Carter, and Germaine Greer—saying: He brought this on himself, he got himself into trouble with “his own people” and now we have to get him out of it, he criticized Mrs. Thatcher but now her government is paying to save his neck and he’s fine with that, and is there really anybody trying to kill him or does he just like the attention? And why are we paying all this money to protect him when he seems to be doing just fine? And we don’t really like him anyway, because he’s not a very nice man. (For the record: there were, to my knowledge, at least six assassination plots against me in the years after the fatwa, foiled by the expertise of the British intelligence services.)

The wild night language of my dreams told the truth. “Night language” is a Joycean term, but I will not here attempt to reproduce the language of Finnegans Wake, James Joyce’s mammoth effort to create on the page the syntax of our sleeping minds. Plainer descriptions of my dreams will have to suffice.

The Raft of the Medusa brought to life, except that the people on the raft were all Surrealists—Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, even Leonora Carrington—and they were all fighting savagely, trying to gouge out one another’s eyes.

what was called “protective feeling” had returned even to those fingers. I could feel heat, so I wouldn’t burn myself, and I could feel sharpness, so I wouldn’t cut myself. These were always the first feelings that returned, I was told. How intelligent the human body was, I thought, admiringly. What a wonder it is, this thing we all inhabit. What a piece of work is a man.

For three months I hadn’t been able to think about writing. When I finally did, and I looked into the notes I’d been making for a possible novel to follow Victory City, it felt absurd. I can’t write this, I told myself. However much I wanted to focus on fiction, something immense and nonfictional had happened to me, and I saw that Andrew Wylie had been right. Until I dealt with the attack, I wouldn’t be able to write anything else. I understood that I had to write the book you’re reading now before I could move on to anything else. To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.

“The Faith of a Rationalist,” Bertrand Russell has this to say: “Men tend to have the beliefs that suit their passions. Cruel men believe in a cruel God, and use their belief to excuse their cruelty. Only kindly men believe in a kindly God, and they would be kindly in any case.” This sounds convincing,

Meanwhile, America is sliding back towards the Middle Ages, as white supremacy exerts itself not only over Black bodies, but over women’s bodies too. False narratives rooted in antiquated religiosity and bigoted ideas from hundreds of years ago are used to justify this, and find willing audiences and believers.