You would never guess it, but there were at least seven attempts on the life of Salman Rushdie. Only one of them, having brought him to the brink of death, has been written about.
The chronology of Rushdie’s flight from fatwa is interesting. The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini passed the death fatwa against him in 1989. Rushdie called it his “unfunny Valentine” because it was issued on February 14. On February 18, Rushdie apologised for the “distress the publication has occasioned to the sincere followers of Islam”. On the 19th, Khomeini’s office rejected the apology and ordered “every Muslim… to send him to hell.”
Rushdie went into hiding for 10 long years, peripatetic and sandbagged by a protective police contingent. In 1998, under the reformist President Mohammad Khatami, the Iranian government promised to not enforce the fatwa nor rescind it—in genuflection to the technicality that a fatwa can only be withdrawn by the person who issued it, and Khomeini having died four months after issuing it. Upon his re-emergence that year, Rushdie embarked on a whirlwind of public appearances that seemed celebratory. It was nearly a quarter century later on August 12, 2022—when the world, and he, had nearly forgotten about it—that the fatwa emerged from a shadow-world of proscriptions propelling the knife of a man who hadn’t read more than a couple of pages of the book and had learnt his radicalism entirely on YouTube.
Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, released this month, is Rushdie’s attempt to come to terms with his stabbing by a young man he remembers as “a squat missile …a murderous ghost from the past”. As we read the book, we realise that nothing prepares us for the stunning dreadfulness of the assault.
According to a paper in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine (January 2024), the average knife attack lasts 2.42 seconds. The one on Rushdie went on for 27 seconds. It is a miracle that we are reading this book today. Rushdie, an avowed atheist whose novels are replete with magic realism, both disputes and accepts the miraculousness of his survival.
In his 2010 book Knife Crime: The Law of the Blade, John McShane writes about “the quick, uncaring thrust of a blade from a feral youth lacking compassion or morality”. And this is exactly what happened to Rushdie, beset by a radicalised man with conviction but neither principle nor reason.
“When you are stabbing someone, it’s close and in your face. The experience is extremely graphic; it somehow tells an emotional story of hate or rage,” wrote Robert Kaiser in a LinkedIn post in November 2018 (‘The Global Rise of Knife Crime—Why?’). Four years later, it is pretty much the same conclusion Rushdie came to. His stabber, whom he refuses the dignity of a name and calls ‘the A’, “looked absurdly, almost endearingly young, and in his calm demeanour it was possible to imagine the folly of youth”. But he didn’t think Rushdie was a good person, thought him “disingenuous” and “admired” Ayatollah Khomeini. Rushdie saw the man “just stabbing wildly, stabbing and slashing, the knife flailing at me as if it had a life of its own”. For the record, knife attacks fall into three categories: the stab, the slash, and slash and stab, the last being the deadliest. Rushdie describes the last.
It was a bloody denouement for a fatwa barely two sentences long, one of the briefest in the long history of fatwas and entirely unexplained. “Date: Bahman, Rajab; location: Jamaran, Tehran; issue: fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie, the author of the blasphemous book Satanic Verses; audience: Muslims of the world.”
Rushdie was much respected in the haute littérature circles in Iran. The book, however, had not yet been translated into Persian. It had hardly been read in places where it had been banned—including in India, the first country to ban it. Khomeini was trying to quieten the growing grouse against his government by giving populist Islamism a target; the briefer the edict, the sharper and less debatable.
Since Rushdie’s stabbing, death fatwas have been few and far between in the normal avalanche of fatwas. Six plots of varying worrisomeness were unearthed by the police, but they couldn’t stop the flurry of fatwaic violence against people connected with the publication of The Satanic Verses—Italian translator Ettore Capriolo, knifed and seriously injured; Hitoshi Igarashi, the translator into Japanese, stabbed to death; Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, shot thrice; Azis Nesin, the Turkish translator, targeted by arsonists. After this barbarianism, brought on partly by frustration at the inability to get to Rushdie, was expended, death fatwas fell. It is comforting to think that this is because of a blowback against zealotry by the Muslim qaum, which has suffered enough hyperviolence itself, but perhaps it is also somewhat optimistic.
After all, a fatwa against Egyptian writer Farag Fouda ended in his murder in 1992. Another led to Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz being stabbed several times in the neck in 1994 for a book he had written in 1959. A 2011 fatwa against Muammar al-Gaddafi led to his horrific death the same year. And a fatwa issued in 2013 against German-Egyptian author Hamed Abdel-Samad is still active.
Mahfouz and Rushdie survived their assassination attempts—deeply scarred, haunted by post-trauma brain-freeze, but eventually saved by their words.
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)
Kajal Basu | Veteran journalist