Book: Knife
Author: Salman Rushdie
Country: India
Format: Audiobook
Narrator: Salman Rushdie
Length: 6 hours
Publication: 2024
I first read about this book in Liel Leibovitz’s review titled Salman Rushdie’s Beautiful Revenge. In it, he shared his insights about the book the Indian-born British-American novelist Rushdie wrote to come to terms with the attack that almost took his life. I knew about the attack, but it was the first time I heard about the book. I was immediately curious.
I’ve tried to read Midnight’s Children (one of Salman’s most famous books) this year and I ended up abandoning it. I like the plot and where the author took the story, but I ended up finding the writing too chaotic for me. One time the character was out in the field, and in the same line he was also talking to his mother at home?? I might still go back to it though.
But anyway, I decided that “Knife” would be a good place to get to know Rushdie better. And I was right.
The book tells the story of the knife attack that happened against the author in August 12th, 2022. But to understand that attack, we need to go back to 1988. In that year, Salman published his fourth book, titled “The Satanic Verses”. The title of the book is a reference to the verses of the Quran that praised pagan goddesses. Those verses were removed from the holy text, on the argument that the devil had sent the message to tempt the prophet Muhammad.
In “The Satanic Verses”, Rushdie recounts that passage, as well as other episodes of Muhammad’s life. I haven’t read the book or dived into the controversy of those verses, so I can’t tell how incendiary or not Salman’s book is. What matters is that many people in the Muslim world took offence, including the supreme leader of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1989 he issued a fatwa condemning the author and those involved in the book publication to death and calling “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay”.
Is important to say that many notable Muslim writers came to Rushdie’s defense and published a book called “For Rushdie: Essays By Arab And Muslim Writers In Defense Of Free Speech”. Nevertheless, many tried to carry the order, especially because it involved a $6 million reward. Salman had to live under police protection for the next decade, and the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death for having worked in the book.
Forward 33 years in time and Rushdie felt he was safe. He was recently married and living in New York, still publishing books. Until August 12th, 2022, when he was attacked during an event at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, in which he was ironically speaking in support of writers who are threatened. The 75-year-old author was stabbed 15 times and barely survived. His attacker was contained and arrested.
“I got to my feet and watched him come. I didn’t try to run. I was transfixed.
Knife
It had been 33 years since the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s notorious death order (…). 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 towards me was, so it’s you. Here you are.”
“Knife” is the book telling his journey of physical recovery and coming to terms with what happened. And that’s where the book shines. Because you see, Rushdie could have written a long rant on how religious intolerance is destroying the world and the injustice of living with a death sentence hanging over your head for something you wrote. But instead, he wrote a love story.
“One of the most important ways in which I have understood what happened to me and the nature of the story I’m here to tell is that it’s a story in which hatred, the knife, as a metaphor of hate, is answered and finally overcome by love.”
Knife
The main character of the book, other than himself, is not the attacker (who he refuses to name) or the people who wanted him dead, but his wife, the also writer Rachel Eliza Griffiths. He describes how she, her family and Rushdie’s sons stayed by his side during the most critical moments, when not even the doctors thought he was going to make it. As she wrote it herself for The Guardian, “Ours was a love story, not an attempted murder story”.
He retells the story of how they met, the life they had built together and how happy they make each other. As he describes her strength, character and unconditional love towards him, you can’t help but fall in love with her a little bit. So Rushdie ended up performing this surprising magic trick in which a book about a terrible and violent attack born out of hate and intolerance leaves the reader in the end with a little bit more love towards the world. And it’s hard to demonize a man who just wants to live in peace with his loved one.
“I have learned a lot about demonization. That’s true.
Knife
I know that it is possible to construct an image of a man, a second self, that bears very little resemblance to the first self. But this second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again until it begins to feel real, more real than the first self.
To answer your question, I know I am not that second self.
I am myself, and I turn away from hatred and towards love.”
His recovery was hard. As a result of the attack, he lost an eye and part of the movements and sensitivity in one of the hands. He also still bears scars on his face and lost part of his mouth movements. During the book, he does not shy away from retelling how his different body parts had to be put back together during the weeks that followed.
Photo by Elena Ternovaja CC License
But it was not just his physical self that had to be put together. You don’t get out of an attack like this without emotional scars. The book is also about Rushdie coming to terms with living under the shade of his condemning fatwa and the book that started it all.
“I recall thinking back then that there were two ways in which the fatwa could derail me, destroy me as an artist.
Knife
If I started writing frightened books, or if I started writing revenge books, both options would destroy my individuality and independence and make me no more than a creature of that attack. (…)
So the only way to survive as an artist was to understand the literary path I was on, to accept the journey I had chosen, and to continue to go down that path that had required an act of will.
And now I was being asked the question again, who was I?”
This book made me admire Rushdie, not only as a writer but as a person. It also made me have a different outlook on similar attacks, such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting. It’s much more painful when we have an understanding of what the victims go through. At the time of the attack in Paris, a lot of people said they wouldn’t stand by the killed cartoonists because they openly mocked the Muslim religion with disrespectful cartoons (in their defense they mocked everyone, including the Pope and the queen of England). I was one of those people.
But Rushdie’s story made me realize that a truly free world where ideas of all kinds can coexist will always have ugly satire. I definitely don’t agree with the sometimes even cruel way they portrayed Muslims, and I don’t think those images should be published. But in a truly free world, we are also free to use our voice to heavily criticize and even sue them. At the moment when someone gets stabbed 15 times for writing some words on a piece of paper, there’s no defense of the act.
And that’s the conclusion I’ve been coming to, time and time again. Every time a group uses violence (and here I also think about Israel’s attacks on Palestine), instead of weakening their enemies, they make them stronger. By putting a death sentence on Salman Rushdie’s head they turned him into a strong advocate for freedom of speech. By trying to kill him they turned him into a symbol of resistance.
Leave a Reply