Salman the unconquerable

Sir Salman Rushdie has spoken for the first time about being stabbed last year at an event in New York. In an interview with?The New Yorker, the author and British citizen said he was “lucky… my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude”.

Sir Salman has lived with a bounty on his head ever since his Booker Prize-winning novel,?The Satanic Verses, attracted the ire of Islamists the world over after it was published in 1988. Hardline clerics, community leaders and protesters condemned it as blasphemous. Copies were burnt, protests organised, and effigies of the author hanged, until eventually this agitation caught the attention of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini who issued his fatwa in 1989, offering $3 million to anyone who would kill the author, or anyone involved in its publication and distribution.

Ahead of a speech in August last year, he was attacked on stage by an Islamist sympathiser and stabbed in the chest, liver, hand, face and neck. Sir Salman spent six weeks in hospital, and has lost the sight in his right eye. But he has not lost his sense of humour, joking during his interview that people who turned against him during the fatwa have changed their tune. “People didn’t like it, because I should have died,” he said. “Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. That was my mistake back then – not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get 15 stab wounds, much better.”

At other moments, however, he is more sombre, speaking of his ongoing battle with PTSD, and admitting to not being “out of the forest” just yet.

“There have been nightmares – not exactly the incident, but just frightening,” he said. “Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant check-ups. It was a colossal attack… I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day.”

In an unsettling piece for?Spiked, Brendan O’Neill suggests the “dark truth” about the attempt on Salman’s life is that “it is not as alien to our civilisation as we would like to believe”. It was, he says, “really a more violent, more medieval manifestation of an idea that is tragically commonplace now – that words wound, feeling offended is terrible, and steps must sometimes be taken to blacklist or silence those who hurt your feelings”. Understood in that context, Haidi Matar, Rushdie’s would-be assassin, is not so much a last, desperate lunge against modernity as “a more menacing enforcer of the cult of cancellation that has Western society in its baleful grip”.

And yet, when it comes down to it, what has Matar actually ‘enforced’? For all Rushdie’s self-deprecating references to the “blankness and junk” of his recent output, the fact is that his first instinct while convalescing has been to write – and not just to write, but to make plans to write about the attack and its aftermath (“a kind of first-person sequel”, he says, to the third-person memoir,?Joseph Anton).

Beyond the barbarity of the physical attack, then, this defiant, unconquerable 75-year-old author has in fact retained the ability and the right to craft what fellow novelist Jeanette Winterson once described as “the language that books allow”; a way to undercut the literalism of dogma, to talk about complexity, to connect to other times, places, deeper sympathies, to explore the untamed open spaces of the imagination – a way to keep the heart awake to love and beauty, as Coleridge has it. Nor, for that matter, is Matar in any position to redeem his palpable failings as an enforcer, menacing or otherwise, commanding little more these days than his secret society of one and the contents of a prison cell around which he paces, up and down, up and down, lost in a darkness that will lengthen into his life.

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