Salman Rushdie's 'Knife' cuts open an empowering defence of free speech

In his latest book Knife, Meditations After An Attempted Murder, Salman Rushdie recalls a doctor's observation at a Pennsylvania hospital where he was brought after a knife attack on him on August 12, 2022.

"You know what you are lucky about? You are lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife."

For 27-seconds on that fateful day, Rushdie was stabbed and slashed wildly by a 24-year-old man at a literary event in New York's Chautauqua. The author of fifteen novels lost an eye and the use of an arm due to the attack. Authorities later described the attacker sympathetic to Shia extremism and the causes of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

The knife attack on Rushdie came over 33years after that Valentine's Day of 1989 when Iran's then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared his novel 'The Satanic Verses' blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering his execution and "all those involved in its publication."

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While on a hospital bed after the knife attack, the opening line of 'The Satanic Verses' returned to haunt the 76-year-old author.

"To be born again," sang Gibreel farishta from the heavens, "first you have to die".

For decades after that fatwa, Rushdie went on to live as a free person. He wrote book after book, delivered lectures, travelled, married, divorced, and emerged as the nucleus of New York's literature circuit while gathering admirers and critics across the world.

But in 2022, the semblance of normalcy in Rushdie's life was fundamentally changed. It was three days before the 75th anniversary of India's freedom from the British rule.

"I was in the habit of calling Indian Independence Day 'Saleem's birthday'," Rushdie writes, as this was the moment in which Saleem Sinai, the antihero and narrator of 'Midnight's Children' had been born in 1947.

"But this year Independence Day had a more personal meaning. Monday, August 15 was Day Three. The day on which it became clear that I would continue to live," Rushdie writes of the moment when he knew he had survived.

As a city boy born in Bombay, who found home in London and New York at different points of time in his life, Rushdie in past has characterised roots as a "conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places."

But in the 'Knife', he describes dreaming about returning to his place of birth, present-day Mumbai, as one of the manifestations of the Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after the knife attack . "I dreamed of returning to my beloved Bombay — not Mumbai — and kneeling to kiss the tarmac after coming down from the plane."

"But when I looked up there was a crowd shouting at me, Dafa ho. Begone."

After the near-fatal stabbing and decades of threats following Khomeini's fatwa, 'Knife, Meditations After An Attempted Murder', is Rushdie's intimate and intellectually stimulating death-defying act. He refuses to name the attacker and describes him merely as A. In an imaginary conversation with the attacker spanning several pages, Rushdie pulls off a fierce literary defence of free speech.

As an atheist, Rushdie dissects debatable aspects of faith, religiosity and the way they push vulnerable individuals like A. towards extremism.

His referral to description of death-and-dying by other literature giants and cinematic geniuses — and some incredibly poignant Shakespearean invocation — adds to the breathless narrative of the book.

At its heart, the book challenges the very orthodoxy that filled A. with hatred vile enough that he nearly killed Rushdie for purportedly being "disingenuous". Rushdie defends an artist and art's right to exist because without art, "our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die".

"Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist," Rushdie writes.

"Art accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. And in the end, it outlasts those who oppress it."

'Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder' by Salman Rushdie is published by Penguin Random House. It is available online and major bookstores across the world.