Resilient Rushdie

SALMAN Rushdie has proved beyond doubt that the pen is mightier than the sword — or the knife, for that matter. Over a year and a half after he was attacked by a young man on stage in New York, he has come out with a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. With his typically macabre sense of humour, Rushdie has recalled that he thought he was dying as his left eye hung down his face ‘like a soft-boiled egg’. The Mumbai-born author, winner of the Booker Prize as well as the Booker of Bookers for his masterpiece Midnight’s Children, was stabbed 12 times by Hadi Matar on August 12, 2022.

The attack didn’t really come as a surprise to Rushdie. The threat of assassination had been hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles since the late 1980s, when Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him over his controversial novel The Satanic Verses. He was forced to remain in hiding for several years, even as Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated the book into Japanese, was stabbed to death in July 1991. Earlier that year, the novel’s Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, survived a stabbing at his home in Milan, while William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, narrowly escaped with his life after being shot at in Oslo in October 1993.

Commendably, the writer continues to be a zealous votary of free speech despite his traumatic, near-death experience. ‘The whole point of freedom of speech is that you have to permit speech you don’t agree with,’ he said before the release of his new book. His resilience and defiance show that he won’t be cowed by the threats and attacks of bigots and hate-mongers. Rushdie is in no rush to die — physically, morally or intellectually.