Award-winning novelist Sir Salman Rushdie has opened up for the first time about the attack that nearly ended his life in 2022, calling his survival a “miracle”.
“If you don’t believe in the supernatural, how do you explain the fact that something that feels like a miracle happened?” Rushdie asked “60 Minutes” host Anderson in a Sunday segment. He told Cooper:
“I mean, I certainly don’t feel like a hand came out of the sky and protected me, but I do think something happened that wasn’t supposed to happen,” Rushdie declared. “There’s no explanation for that.”
Rushdie, 76, was stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institute before he was scheduled to give a speech. Paramedics airlifted him to a northwestern Pennsylvania hospital where he underwent surgery.
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He damaged his liver, had nerves severed in his arms and eyes, and eventually lost function in his damaged eyes. The trial of the attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, has been postponed until after the publication of Rushdie’s new memoir, “The Knife,” detailing his experiences, which is released this week.
“One of the surgeons who saved my life said to me, ‘First you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky…The lucky one was the one that hit you. I mean, a man didn’t know how to kill someone with a knife,”’ Rushdie explained, appearing in the interview wearing glasses painted black over his damaged eyes.
Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses sparked protests around the world after its publication in 1988. According to 60 Minutes, the publication of the book led to the murder of a Japanese translator and “attacks on those associated with it.”
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The outrage ultimately led to Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The fatwa forced Rushdie to flee to the United Kingdom, and diplomatic negotiations later led the Iranian state to declare that the issue was “completely over” and that it would no longer encourage anyone in other countries to threaten Rushdie’s life. Before making the allegations, Ms Rushdie had lived in the UK for many years.
But Iranian clerics and religious groups continue to urge their followers to kill Rushdie and regularly raise the bounty on his head, which has reached just under $4 million, Reuters reported. is reporting.
Kiran Desai (left) and Salman Rushdie speak on stage at the Fiction Center’s 2023 Annual Awards Benefit at Broadway Cipriani 25 on December 5, 2023 in New York City. (Ilya S. Sabenok/Getty Images for Fiction Center)
Despite admitting that he had barely read The Satanic Verses, Matar said he stabbed Rushdie because the author “attacked Islam” and that he didn’t like Rushdie too much. Because it wasn’t. He has pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder charge.
Ms Rushdie said she struggled to cope with the attack, which lasted 27 seconds, a “quite long time” during which she felt “an intimacy where life meets death”.
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“To the right of the seating area, I saw a man dressed in black running toward me. Black clothing, black face mask, he came towards me with a hard, low, stubby missile,” Rushdie said. I remembered. “I confess that I have sometimes imagined my assassin standing up in public places and coming after me like this.”
“When I saw this ferocious figure charging towards me, my first thought was, ‘Well, it’s you. Here you are.'” It felt like it was coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back into the past…to kill me.”
Hadi Matar, accused in the attempted murder of British author Salman Rushdie, appears for a hearing in Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, on August 18, 2022. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
Only the intervention of the audience around him, complete strangers to him to this day, stopped the attack and gave him a chance to fight. Although he initially did not want to write this book, he eventually realized that “it became clear that there was nothing else I could write.”
“Language is a way of navigating the world,” Rushdie said. “I don’t have any other weapons, but I’ve been using this particular tool for quite some time, so I thought this was my way of dealing with it.”
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“I don’t feel like I’ve changed much, but I do feel like there’s a shadow left,” Rushdie added. “I think the shadow is just there. Some days it’s dark, some days it’s not…I feel the presence of death more strongly.”
