Did Salman Rushdie foresee the attack that nearly killed him?

Salman Rushdie is talking about a dream he had on August 9, 2022. It involved a gladiator with a spear, in a Roman amphitheatre. The audience was roaring for more blood. Rushdie was screaming and rolling around on the floor trying to avoid the gladiator’s downward thrusts. “It really spooked me,” the 76-year-old author recalls from his home in New York. “In retrospect, maybe I should have listened to the dream.”

Three nights later, on August 12, Rushdie was at the Chautauqua educational institute, in south-western New York state. He was due to give a talk about creating safe spaces for writers. It never happened. Instead, a 24-year-old Lebanese American man from New Jersey – who entered the building using a false identity concocted from the names of two Shia Muslim extremists – attacked Rushdie on stage with a knife and nearly killed him.

Author Salman Rushdie is cared for following the attack on August 12, 2022.Credit: AP

“He was just stabbing wildly,” Rushdie writes in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It is Rushdie’s 22nd book and third memoir and begins with the novelist recalling his near-death experience. The attack lasted approximately 27 seconds. Fortunately, the event’s moderator, Henry Reese (who was also injured), intervened and dragged the would-be killer to the floor. Members of the audience also helped. Rushdie says these acts of “pure heroism” saved his life. “My main thought lying on the stage, surrounded by a lake of blood, was: this is probably the end.”

Rushdie was flown by helicopter to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where his surgery lasted eight hours. He had multiple wounds – on the neck, right eye, left hand, liver, abdomen, forehead, cheeks and mouth. “One of the surgeons who operated on me later told me, ‘When we initially brought you in, we didn’t think we could save you’,” Rushdie says.

During the attack the optic nerve in his right eye was severely damaged. “Today, when I walk the streets of New York, I get recognised because I look like this,” says Rushdie pointing to the blackened right lens of his glasses. He is now blind in that eye.

Rushdie speaks of the post-traumatic stress he suffered. It manifested itself in many ways. There was a lot negative thinking, and he could barely get out of bed some days. He thought he might never write again. “I was physically weak, and I believed the 21 books I had written up until that point might be the sum total of the work,” he says.

There are regular nightmares too. Rushdie has used various coping mechanisms to combat the stress and suffering. Embracing gratitude is one of them. “I’m going to be 77 in June,” he says. “These are days I wasn’t supposed to have, so I feel lucky to have them.”

Rushdie also takes solace in the fact that while his attack began with hateful venom, it’s very much a story that ended with love. There were the men and women who saved his life, for starters. His memoir is dedicated to them. Then there is the support of his family. Rushdie’s sister, Sameen. His two sons, Zafar and Milan, and his granddaughter, Rose. They all played their part, rallying around him following the attack.

‘I’m going to be 77 in June. These are days I wasn’t supposed to have, so I feel lucky to have them.’

Rushdie’s wife, the writer, photographer and poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, went into what he calls in the book “super-hero mode”. “She showed neither grief nor fear, neither exhaustion nor stress, but only love and strength,” he writes. “In the time of my greatness weakness, she became my – our – unbreakable rock.”

The couple met at a literary event in Manhattan in May 2017. Rushdie had already been married four times. In September 2021, in a very private ceremony, he walked down the aisle for a fifth time.

Salman Rushdie with his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, in London last year.Credit: Getty Images

When the attack happened, it momentarily felt like the happy, loving life they had built over the previous five years had come to an end, says Rushdie. He borrows a line from If This Is a Man by Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who wrote that “perfect happiness is not attainable” but neither is “perfect unhappiness”. Rushdie suggests that after the attack, Griffiths would have said that “Levi was wrong and that perfect unhappiness was the name of the country in which she now lived”.

“Trauma experts often say that sometimes a person within the family of the person who was attacked is more traumatised than the person themselves,” Rushdie says. “That might be true in this case.” Hosting friends at home in New York was one way the couple began to feel like normal life could resume. Griffiths began filming and interviewing Rushdie at home. She also took numerous photos of his injuries. Watching them together on a projector was, says Rushdie, a necessary step in taking the leap from trauma to healing.

“The attack has been very traumatising for both of us, but fortunately, we have good therapists who helped us through it, we have a very strong relationship, and we are now in a good place,” he says.

Another chapter of Knife is devoted to his attacker. Rushdie initially wanted to meet him, but Griffiths was strongly opposed. “I wanted to sit in a room with him and say, ‘Tell me about it’,” Rushdie writes. “I wanted him to look me in my (one remaining) eye and tell me the truth.” Throughout the memoir Rushdie refers to his assailant as “the a”. The novelist even has a lengthy imagined conversation with him.

This fictional scene happens in Chautauqua County Jail. Rushdie begins by asking his attacker if he has ever thought of murdering anyone else. “The a” replies that he has not. He then tells Rushdie that he has not bothered to read his work. Rushdie responds by telling him that if he had, he would know that one of his novels is a story about an East London Muslim family running a cafe, portrayed with real love. The conversation concludes with Rushdie telling him that he made a bad gamble and lost.

“He is going to be tried and will no doubt be sent away to jail for quite a long time,” Rushdie says. “So to me he has become something very close to an irrelevance.”

Rushdie doesn’t normally think of writing as catharsis or therapy but “writing about the attack felt like being in charge of my life again and not just being a victim of a knife attack”, he says. It also made him think about novels where knives crop up in significant moments of drama. Franz Kafka’s The Trial concludes with Joseph K being brutally murdered with a knife. Rushdie also examined moments from his own work where knives are prominent. Shalimar the Clown (2005) tells the story of the former US ambassador to India, Maximilian Ophuls, who is nearly beheaded by his driver outside his Los Angeles home.

The genesis of the book evolved from a single image: a dead man lying on the ground, while a second man stands over him, holding a bloodied knife. “The imagination can work in ways that you are not even consciously aware of and foreshadow things in your life,” says Rushdie. “If I believed in prophecy, well, that would certainly be one, but I’m more inclined to think it was just a weird coincidence.”

Perhaps. But what about the date Rushdie learned he was going to survive? In his memoir he points out that it was August 15, three days after he was stabbed. This is also the date when Midnight’s Children (1981) begins. That novel is narrated by Saleem Sinai, who was born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, when Jawaharlal Nehru was sworn in as the first prime minister of newly independent India.

The novel earned Rushdie the Booker prize and a reputation as a cosmopolitan urban writer who refuses to be pigeonholed into one place or one culture. “We are all multiple selves,” says Rushdie. “Like many of my characters, I contain contradictions, complexity, and have many sides.”

Rushdie writes about his country of birth from the vantage point of geographical, cultural and spiritual exile.

‘He will no doubt be sent away to jail for quite a long time ... so to me he has become something very close to an irrelevance.’

“During the [mid-1970s] while living in London I was drifting away from India, so I decided to go back there and travel around,” he says. “I did that for almost five months, then I came back and started writing a book that was forming in my head that eventually became Midnight’s Children.”

Rushdie grew up in a secular Muslim family in Mumbai (which he still calls by its old imperial name, Bombay). An avid reader from an early age, he remembers an atmosphere at home where free speech and ideas were discussed without fear.

In 1961, aged 13, he was sent to a boarding school in Rugby, England. His father, Anis Ahmed, accompanied him initially. Before the school term started, they shared a room at the Cumberland Hotel in London. Rushdie recalls how Anis, an angry alcoholic, would get plastered most nights on Johnnie Walker whisky. Then the verbal abuse would start. Rushdie survived the ordeal, and boarding school, and eventually graduated from Cambridge University in 1968 with an MA in history.

“The problematic relationship I had with my father was probably the reason I decided to live in England,” Rushdie says. “I wanted to – quite literally – put oceans between him and me.” Anis died of cancer in 1987. “I got back [home] one week before he died. It was an important week of reconciliation and love and I’m very glad I had it.”

The following year Rushdie published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. Most of the narrative focuses on the life of Saladin Chamcha, an Indian ex-pat voice actor who has a troubled relationship with his country of birth, and his father. “The Satanic Verses is mostly about London in the 1980s,” says Rushdie. “But people tend to think of it as some kind of Islamic text, because of two chapters that are dream sequences.”

Salman Rushdie in 1988, the year The Satanic Verses was published.Credit: Getty Images

It was these dreams that sparked the claims of blasphemy that led Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa against Rushdie on February 14, 1989, ordering Rushdie’s execution and offering a bounty on his head.

Several London bookshops were bombed in London. In August 1989, a Lebanese national, Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh, died when a bomb intended for Rushdie prematurely exploded in a London hotel. Rushdie spent the next decade under police protection; Britain’s intelligence agencies are believed to have foiled another five serious assassination plots.

Iranian exiles living in Europe at the time contacted Rushdie and asked if they could translate the book into Farsi and have it smuggled into Iran. “I said, yes, please go ahead,” he says. “I gave them the rights for nothing, but I’m glad it happened because it gave people in Iran the chance to read the book.

“I’m still very proud of the novel. But every time I have to talk about it, people don’t want to talk about the book itself, they want to talk about the reaction and subsequent events that happened around the book.”

Was Rushdie’s assailant on August 12, 2022, acting on behalf of a particular group, ideology, or country? Rushdie doesn’t believe so. He thinks “the a” fits the psychological profile for the typical lone-wolf killer. Namely: a disillusioned and lonely young male who turns to extremist violence to give his life meaning.

Rushdie after being made a Companion of Honour, recognising his services to literature, by Britain’s Princess Anne in May last year.Credit: AP

Rushdie speaks about what is perhaps the greatest irony of this story: he began his career as a novelist after gleaning inspiration from a poem written in the 12th century in north-eastern Iran. “My first novel, Grimus (1975), was based on a work of Persian literature: a narrative poem, The Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-Din Attar.” A decade before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Rushdie travelled to Iran. “A friend and I drove from England, in a mini, all the way to India and we spent quite a lot of time in Iran on the way,” he recalls. “I thought the people were wonderful and the culture was fantastic.”

Rushdie’s biography is very much a story of colourful journeys. With each new beginning, his identity has evolved. When he left India for England, he was the ultimate outsider. Becoming a famous novelist in London changed the script again. When the fatwa was issued, some Muslims despised him and many in the West no longer saw him as just a novelist. He accidentally became a global figurehead for freedom of expression. To some extent Rushdie embraced that new role. The alternative was to hand the censors an easy victory. But there was a downside. “It put some people off reading my books and that was disappointing,” he says.

Rushdie’s decision to make a fresh start in New York in 2000 – “rejoining polite society” as he puts it – was liberating. But it meant tabloid journalists began fishing for stories to suit a new narrative about Rushdie the party animal and incessant womaniser. Many still paid attention to his novels, though. His international awards include the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature and the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award. In 2007 Rushdie received a knighthood for his services to literature.

Is Sir Salman Rushdie now worthy of the holy grail of literature: the Nobel Prize? Many critics think so. His memoir recalls a conversation with a former winner, Günter Grass. The German novelist (who received the prize in 1999 and died in 2015) told Rushdie many years ago that being a writer with an international reputation sometimes felt like being two people at once. Rushdie spoke about Günter the private man and Grass the public figure, out there in the world making trouble. Rushdie understands what this feels like. As he puts it in his memoir, “I too am both Salman and Rushdie.”

When he was a small boy in Bombay, Rushdie was often asked by his parents’ friends what he wanted to be when he grew up. He always gave the same answer: “I want to be a writer.” Looking back on the troubled path his ambition led him down, he says: “It’s very weird to be famous for the wrong reason. This degree of attention, I would much rather do without.”

This seems to be Rushdie’s very measured way of saying: it’s the work that matters. As he puts it in the closing pages of his memoir: “Art is not a luxury. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it.”

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is published by Jonathan Cape, $36.99.