Ideas - The Life and Times of Salman Rushdie

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Salman Rushdie sees reality through the lens of time. There are the months after the nearly-fatal attack of August 2022 that he details in his memoir Knife. And the decade following the Iranian state���s February 1989 fatwa against him. In this conversation with Nahlah Ayed, he describes hinge moments in his uncannily storied life. *This episode originally aired on April 30, 2024.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. You've written before about what you call hinge moments in history. We started a series called Hinge Moments in which we quote you and talk about moments that are important in history. series called Hinge Moments in which we quote you and talk about moments that are important in history. I wonder if you think of hinge moments also as happening in personal history as well. Yeah, well this is one. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyad.

That personal hinge moment that Salman Rushdie is talking about might well have been his last. We begin with breaking news. Author Salman Rushdie is talking about might well have been his last. We begin with breaking news. Author Salman Rushdie attacked on stage in western New York. Video shows people rushing to the stage to help Rushdie at Chautauqua Institution. He was about to give a lecture when police say a man stormed the stage and stabbed him in the neck. Critical injuries to his body, including his left hand and right eye. He's made a strong recovery, but he did lose sight in his eye. Frankly, I'm still not used to it.

You know, I think about it when I wake up in the morning. And I've always had a fear of blindness. The brutal attack took place just after 10.45 a.m. on August 12, 2022. The date, the time, the duration, all things that he notes in his memoir, Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It's Salman Rushdie's 22nd book, and as with his breakthrough novel, Midnight's Children, he looks at life through the lens of time. There are moments in life, intense moments, when time either goes very, very fast or very, very slowly. So you see the world in slow motion. The time expands almost frame by frame.

The time expands so that you almost frame by frame. As a writer, Rushdie is interested in history and memory and story, free will and the unpredictable hand of fate. And in uncanny ways, those literary themes have visited the author's real life as well. In the conversation you're about to hear, we spoke about Salman Rushdie's hinge moments, from that fateful morning in 2022 right back to 1989, when Iran's supreme leader issued a fatwa, a death sentence against him, as author of the Satanic Verses, a book that the Ayatollah said had insulted the sacred beliefs of Muslims. But we started with the present moment in this book.

Thank you again for doing this. I met with him in New York on April 16, 2024, the official publication date for his memoir. Knife, the title, is's kind of a cold metallic fact, but you've decided to reclaim the word and you've redeployed it as a weapon. Can you explain how? I mean, it was actually, when I really seriously started thinking about writing this book, it was the first word I had. I thought the first thing I knew is what it was called. It was the first word I had.

I thought the first thing I knew is what it was called. And for two reasons, really. One is the obvious reason, that it takes its point of origin in a knife attack. But then I thought, in a way, there's a passage in the book where I talk about how language is a knife. It's a way of cutting things open. It's a way of revealing the truth, etc. And it's a useful tool for getting to the heart of things. And that's the only, I mean, I don't have guns or knives or etc. You know, I have language.

So I think in a way the book itself is my knife. Well, you say that if I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back. Yeah, if you're caught in a knife fight, get yourself a knife. And I thought this is my way of fighting back. And also, in a way, not just fighting back, but taking control of the narrative. Not just being the victim on the ground with blood pouring out of him,

but somebody in control of the story telling it. How sharp a tool is language as a tool to fight back? I thought it was very useful actually. The book was a book that I was at first reluctant to write, but once I decided to do it, I just found the words, you know, the words came. I think the hardest bit to write, slowest bit to write was the description of the actual attack, sort of the first chapter. That was really tough. Once I passed that hurdle, it really opened up.

And the words came quite fluently, I'm happy to say. You had a hard time, but you did get into it in a fair amount of detail, the attack. I'm just wondering what the strongest image you retain in your mind of the actual attack. Oh, the sense of my own body lying on the ground in this kind of lake of blood, an expanding lake of blood. The thing I don't remember, the thing I don't have any memory of, is pain.

Interesting. Even though people who were there and who spoke to the press afterwards said that I was screaming with pain, I have no memory of that at all. I just think that what happens in the case of like deep shock is that it takes over your senses. So there was this kind of odd disconnect between how I was experiencing the event inside me and how people outside me were seeing that I was experiencing it. So my outside body was yelling and screaming. My inside self was not.

But do you remember what you were thinking at the moment? Well, I was thinking that I was probably going to die, you know. And it would have been strange not to think that in the middle of this lake of blood. From the first chapter of Knife. Somebody, probably a doctor, was saying, raise his legs up, we need the blood to flow to his heart. I was on the floor with my clothes cut off me

and my legs waving in the air. I was, like King Lear, not in my perfect mind, but I had enough consciousness to feel humiliated. In the presence of serious injuries, your body's privacy ceases to exist. You lose autonomy over your physical self. You allow people to do what they will with your body, to prod and drain and inject and stitch and inspect your nakedness so that you can live.

You had to revisit some really difficult moments in writing this book. How did you do it without getting down psychologically? Well, first of all, because I have a very good therapist that I can talk things through with. And secondly, if you're aware of the risk, it's a way of warning yourself against it. There, of course, is a risk of re-traumatizing yourself by going back into that very bad place.

But if you're aware that that's a possibility, then in a way your mind guards against it. And I just think, you know, the thing I most like about being a writer is the act of writing. Everything else around it is all kerhoopla. But actually doing the writing, I've always been very, taken great pleasure in that. And so even when it's a really dark subject like this, the actual writing was something that kept my spirits up.

Here you really are a vulnerable character in this book. I mean, you talk about your body, your loves, your fears. Why were you willing to be so open? Well, I just think, you know, ever since, if you look at the history of the memoir, ever since the Confessions of Rousseau, which more or less invented the memoir form, I mean, the rule has been, tell as much truth as you can. And if you can't do that, don't write it. And I wanted people to kind of experience it along with me. Both the attack and the recovery and the kind of almost

what you might call a happy ending. What is your sense of how the mind and memory work after such a major trauma? Well, they work in a very strange double way. There's parts of my memory that are clearly actually wrong. The way I remember things is not the way in which they were witnessed by other people who were there. So there's a kind of delirium about part of it.

And then the other part of it, the memory is astonishingly clear. You see things in like hyper-focus. And obviously I did what research I could into what was written and reported about the event. And I learned a lot from that. I mean, this figure of 27 seconds that I use is the duration of the attack. Obviously, I wasn't timing it. But that's how it was reported afterwards. Interesting you expressed it in terms of being as long as a Shakespearean sonnet. Yeah. Or the Lord's Prayer.

Or the Lord's Prayer, which is not my team, really. But yeah, you can recite a Shakespearean sonnet in that time. And it's actually quite a long time. It's a long time if you have a knife and the other person doesn't, and you mean him harm. What do you make of the fact that you had a nightmare a couple of days before this happened? And not only that, but you've actually written about similar scenarios more than once. Yeah. You know, when it happened, the dream, which was two days before I went up there, I was quite spooked by it. And I remember saying to my wife Eliza, you know, I don't want to

go. And I really thought I don't want to go. I should cancel. Why did you go? I thought, you know, it's a dream. Who changes their whole day around because of a dream? And also, you know, I've said I'd go. They sold tickets. People are expecting me to come you know it's all set up and I thought I can't let them down you know so just because I had a bad dream

who would believe that sorry I can't come because I had a bad dream that told me not to come it just doesn't seem right but how do you connect those scenarios that you wrote about that involve knives and blindness and stabbings? You know, that's twice. The Shadow Marrow the Clown is a novel

which begins with a knife murder. And the most recent novel, Victory City, has the central character at one point in the novel is blinded. And a part of it, I think, is to do with the fact, as I said in the book, that my great fear has always been blindness. And I use the metaphor of Orwell's Room 101. In Room 101 in 1984,

you meet the worst thing in the world. And the worst thing in the world is different for everybody. So for Winston Smith, the character in 1984, the worst thing in the world is rats. So that's what he meets in Room 101. And for me, the worst thing in the world would be blindness. So I think it was because I anyway had that fear.

When writing Victory City, I kind of wrote that out, you know, through the attack on the character of my character, Pampa Kampana. From Victory City, the novel by Salman Rushdie, written before the August 12th attack. The first dreams that came were nightmares. She watched the approach of the rod, felt its heat. Then she woke up, shaking, sweating her lost eyesight out of every pore in her body. She called out to whoever was there watching over her. Paper, she said, and a feather and some ink. I don't know, I guess it's been in my head, in some way lurking in my head for a long time. And you point out that you're not in the habit of describing your books

as in terms of prophecy. No. You don't have a good track record with prophets. No, no, I have some trouble with prophets, not applying for the job. On that point, like your other work, this book is at times very funny. Good. I just wondered, did you struggle to find humor? No, it just comes out that way with me. I think when the writing is going properly, it just comes out that way. And I'm glad it does because, first of all, humor makes it tolerable to read about the intolerable. Humor is also, you know, we laugh together when we laugh.

It brings the writer and the reader closer together. And I mean, just as a reader, I don't really like reading books that have absolutely no sense of humor. And I can think of some very great writers who have absolutely no sense of humor, and we don't have to name them. Although you do say, you reference humor directly when you're talking about the assailant. And one of the reasons you imagine and attempting to kill you is that he has no humor. He doesn't know how to laugh. I think that's general. I would offer it as a general thesis about fanatics and bigots.

You can't imagine a funny fanatic, a witty or humorous racist. I mean, there are probably one or two exceptions to this. But as a general principle, I think humor and fanaticism are incompatible. And so if you see somebody with a sense of humor, they're probably not a fanatic. So yeah, I doubt that he has a rich wit. You experienced, of course, a whole span of emotions since the attack. And at several points, you point out in the book that you were quite determined to see

your assailant. Yes. Why? He's in prison. Why? I wanted to sit down with him and say, why do you do it? Because there is, to my mind, a sort of absence in his story. He's very young. He has no criminal record up to this point.

He wasn't on any terrorism watch list, wasn't involved with fanatic groups. He was a young guy in New Jersey. And to go from that to murder, you know, murder is a very big crime. go from that to murder, you know, murder is a very big crime. And you would think it required very powerful personal motivation for somebody with no previous criminal record. And yet what he says about me in this somewhat unwise interview that he gave to the New York Post from jail, he said that he'd read two pages of something I'd written, and I don't even know what he read.

I mean, the Internet is full of garbage. I don't even know if it's two pages I actually wrote. And he saw a couple of YouTube videos, and that was his motivation. And I think that's... If I was to write that as a fictional character, my editor would say to me, that's not good enough. Not a motivated character.

Not convincing. So there's this absence in the narrative. You tried to fill in that absence with this imaginative. First I thought I'd try to fill it in by actually asking him. And then I thought probably if I was to have the opportunity of meeting him, And then I thought probably if I was to have the opportunity of meeting him, I would get some kind of cliched ideological sloganizing and it wouldn't help me really. And so then I thought, well, let me use what I actually know how to do, which is my gift of imagination and storytelling.

Did it satisfy you at any level to do that? Yeah. storytelling. Did it satisfy you at any level? Yeah, I mean, actually, in many ways, in this rigorously factual book, this one chapter of fiction, I mean, I think I thought it was for me the most interesting part to write. In addition to saying that he had no humor or sense of humor, you also posit that perhaps part of his motivation, or what made him who he is, is that he didn't know love. Yeah. I mean, nobody's come out of the woodwork to say that they're his girlfriend.

There's no sign. Even his mother and sisters have distanced themselves from him. There doesn't seem to. I mean, what do I know? I don't know him. But my guess is that there's not a lot of love in his life. And because if you look at other well-known examples of terrorist acts, that's something they all have in common. You know, the 9-11 attackers didn't seem to have anybody mourning them in the way of a lover.

The people who attacked the terrorist attack in Bombay, the Taj Hotel and the Oberoi Hotel and other places, again those people who were kind of suicide attackers, I've not seen any reports that there were people mourning them who loved them. So it may be that this kind of isolation, emotional isolation, is a contributing factor. In that, just a last thing about the exchange, he accuses you of being a liar. You, in turn, say that it is he who lives in fiction or lives a fiction. What did you mean by that? Well, I mean, he'd spent four years in a basement playing video games. That can mess with your head. You decided to quietly go back to Chautauqua when the attack happened. Why? That's, you know, from the moment that I was beginning to feel well.

From the moment that I was beginning to feel well, so I'm talking about like February, March of last year, I immediately thought one of these days I need it for myself as a kind of healing process to show myself that I'm standing up again in the place where I fell down. I just thought it would be, I mean, somebody else might not have thought this way, but I did. Sure. And initially, Eliza didn't think it was such a great idea. But then she thought she could see it was important to me.

And so she went along with it. And also she came with me because actually on the day of the attack she hadn't been there. So she'd never seen the place. So for her it was a nightmare place in her head and this was a way of making it real. And I didn't really know what the effect would be. I thought the effect could be maybe nothing and I'd go there and feel nothing. The worst effect would be that it would bring back the trauma. But instead,

I mean, I literally, as I wrote in the book, I had this very physical sense of somebody removing a burden from me. And what I said to her is I said, the only way I could describe how I feel is I feel lighter. And ever since that day, I've felt lighter. You also say in the book that you perhaps went back to face up to the unbearable knowledge common to all human beings that it would never be yesterday again. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, there's a, I remember in the Doonesbury cartoon strip, there's one day where one of the characters says to the other, somewhere near the anniversary of the 9-11 attack, one of the characters says, you know, I really miss September the 10th. The world as it was before the thing

that made the world different. And I really miss August the 11th. When I was just a man in love looking at the full moon in a very beautiful place, having just had a nice dinner with friends, and everything was good. One cruel morning stands between Salman before then and Salman after. What's the fundamental difference between those two men? I don't think there's a huge difference.

I think I probably managed to get back to myself for the simple reason that the other piece of good luck was that the knife which penetrated my eye did not reach my brain. It got very close. But it didn't touch the brain. And as a result, in that sense, I'm still who I was, and I'm still able to be myself. But I think the real difference is,

as far as I've been able to understand it so far anyway, is that if you have such a close encounter with death, if you're right next door to death, it doesn't ever quite leave you. That knowledge, which I didn't really have. I mean, we all, you know, something's going to happen to all of us. But most of us don't have a kind of intimacy with it.

And most of us don't think about it all the time. Because that would be awful. I mean, to do the living before you do the dying. And now it's always with me. It's like a shadow. And I'm not saying that it depresses me or anything, but it's just it's there. It's just there.

Just there. And that's the change. You're right that it felt in the moment like your attacker was coming at you from another time, that he was a time traveler coming, dragging back an ugly past. How successfully had you left the 90s behind? Completely. I mean, I've been living in New York City for almost 25 years.

And during that time, I've lived like a perfectly regular writer's life. I've been sitting at home writing my books and going out and doing readings and just You were teaching too. And teaching. And I've just been leading my life in a perfectly regular way. And in that time I've done I think literally hundreds of public events. Lectures that time, I've done, I think, literally hundreds of public events, lectures, readings, literary festivals, anything you can think of. And there's never been the faintest, not an iota of a problem. And I wonder how close to your mind it was, though, given the fact that you reveal

in this book that there had been six previous actual attempts or attempted attempts on your life. Yeah, that was in the old days when the Iranian state was doing its best to have, that was when it was employing professionals. Those were not like this. This is a kind of random kid those were professional assassins hired either by the Iranian state

or by proxies of the Iranian state and that didn't worry you? that worried me a lot of the time but my understanding as far as I know, is that that kind of, that's not happening anymore. And so the risk that remains is this. And this only happened because of a failure of security. So he got lucky. Thank you. XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. Before and after. These are moments that can be as revealing as the momentous event that divides them. In his memoir, Knife, Salman Rushdie draws this image of himself on the peaceful night before the attack that nearly killed him.

Here's a man going to bed. In the morning, his life will change. The future rushes at him while he sleeps. Except, strangely, it's really the past returning. My own past rushing at me. A masked man with a knife, seeking to carry out a death order from three decades ago. Time is a strange creature because it doesn't behave itself. Three decades ago.

February 14th, 1989. The Ayatollah's extraordinary attack and his virtual order to Shiite extremists to attack Mr. Rushdie was reported on Tehran Radio this morning. The world at one broke news of it to Salman Rushdie. I asked him whether he was taking the threat to him seriously. I think I have to take them very seriously indeed. Will you be looking to the British authorities in any form for any kind of protection as a result of this threat?

I think I must. Honestly, I've just heard the news and obviously that is something I may well have to think about. Salman Rushdie was 41 years old at the time, a best-selling, award-winning novelist for his breakthrough Midnight's Children. Bombay-born, educated in England, living in London, renowned internationally. Then, with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, international protests, accusations of blasphemy against Islam. Obviously, it's horrifying that people are willing to proceed in this way

against what is, after all, one novel in the face of the entire history of Islam. in the face of the entire history of Islam. In a dream sequence, he has used the names of our Prophet's wives as prostitutes. He has referred to the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam, he has compared it to a brothel. People say that I've called Muhammad's wives prostitutes. It's not true. It's clearly stated that the real haram was composed of wives living chastely with him, you know,

and to counterpoint that with a profane. This is very offensive. This is not literature. It cannot be literature. Book burnings, book bannings, violence. The decade of the fatwa. Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding, living in safe houses, under police protection for a decade. Fellow novelist and friend Martin Amis said at the time that Rushdie had disappeared into the headlines. But in 2000, Rushdie re-emerged, reclaimed a public life. re-emerged, reclaimed a public life. Although he says this in knife, one of the annoying aspects of what happened to me in Chautauqua is that for a while at least, or perhaps forever, it has dragged that novel back into the narrative of scandal.

But I have no intention of living in that narrative anymore. of living in that narrative anymore. In the second part of our conversation, I talked with Salman Rushdie about his battle to reclaim the narrative of his life, his interest in time and history, and the warring stories of the present moment. So you have kind of this real ambivalence in this book and elsewhere

about the Satanic Verses coming back and kind of in the context of this attack 33 years after the Fatwa was issued. What does that stir up in you? Well, it just, you know, I think in many ways the biggest damage that the whole attack on the Satanic Verses has

done is to turn people away from my work. What people know about me is, oh, I got threatened with death by the Iranian state and now I got a knife stuck in me. You know, those facts is what everybody has. But meanwhile, and I've written two books, which are memoirs, this being the second one, Knife. I've written 20 books which have nothing to do with it. Yes. And, you know, some of them are quite good.

And I just wish that people would look at that side of my life because that's actually how I've led my life. And from Midnight's Children to Victory City, it's a long journey. I was born in Dr. Nalika's nursing home on August the 15th, 1947. And the time, the time matters too. I was born in Dr. Nalika's nursing home on August the 15th, 1947. And the time, the time matters too. Well, then, at night, it's important to me more. On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact,

clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out. At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. From the book Midnight's Children right through to Knife, you are a writer who thinks a lot about time. You talk about dates and hours, and as you mentioned earlier, August the 11th, the day after, the day before.

They're everywhere in your work. Why do you tend to think and see things through that lens? I don't know because the clock's ticking for all of us. And time is a strange creature because it doesn't behave itself. it doesn't behave itself. You know, there are moments in life, intense moments, when time either goes very, very fast or very, very slowly. So you see the world in slow motion. The time expands almost frame by frame. So I've always been, because that has to do with how we perceive.

And if you're a writer, you're interested in how people perceive reality. And our relationship with time is complicated in the way in which we see and experience. So that makes it interesting to write about. Does it have anything to do with your history as a student of history? I think that's very important in my life, the fact that that was what I studied. I mean, I never studied literature. I had to learn that by doing it. But the study of history taught me a lot.

Also about the nature of how you establish meaning. I read a very important little book by a historian called E. H. Carr who wrote a little monograph called What is a Fact? For example, in Italy, lots of people cross rivers all the time. That's Lots of people cross rivers all the time. That's an event, but those aren't facts. Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon with an army is a fact because by doing so he's declaring war on the ruling powers in Rome. So a historical fact is one out of which meaning derives rather than just a random event.

So I think that's not bad advice for a novelist. Write in such a way that the events are significant in the way that they reveal character and destiny and so on. So I had a wonderful history professor who was my supervisor called Arthur Herbert. At Cambridge. At Cambridge. At Cambridge. And he, at King's College, Cambridge. He was a fellow of King's

when I was a student there. And he said to me a thing which I've always remembered. He said, you, what, history. He said, you can't write history until you hear the people speak. Because if you can't hear them speak, you don't know them well enough.

And so you can't tell their story. And I've always thought that's amazing advice for a novelist. And even to this day, when I'm trying to create character, one of the first things I do is to try and work out how they speak. What's their accent? Is it an accent which reveals class? Is it an accent which reveals regionality? Is it an accent which reveals race? Is it an accent which reveals regionality? Is it an accent which reveals race?

Or age. Or age. Then, what kind of slang do they use? Because that's also generational. Do they use bad language? All these questions, by the time you've answered all those questions, you really know who the character is, and you can begin to write that person.

So that's also from the study of history. Sticking with history for a minute, you've written before about what you call hinge moments in history. And just so you know, the last time we spoke about this, we started a second year in a series called Hinge Moments in History, in which we quote you and talk about moments that are important in history. I wonder if you think of hinge moments also as happening in personal history as well. Yeah, well, this is one.

You've had a few dozen. I've had a few. I mean, I think apart from moments of violence or threat, the fact that I, in my life, have made two migrations, that I decided after graduating from university to live in England rather than going back east. And then, 25 years ago, making a second decision,

which was to leave London and come and see what it was like in New York. And actually when I did that, I didn't necessarily know that it was a lifetime decision. I just thought I'm going to go and put myself there for a while and see how it goes. And I thought it might be six months or it might be longer. It ended up being much longer. So those two moments were certainly transformative moments. I mean, my life would have been very different if I'd made a different decision. Absolutely.

Actually, the success of Midnight's Children was a very important moment because it allowed me to live as a writer. And it gave me confidence. It gave me the confidence that I actually was able to do the only thing I've ever wanted to do so there's that too Can we stick with that second hinge moment when you moved to New York and as you say you moved here and decided

basically to live without police protection you became kind of a man who lived openly, you were a man about town you became more of a man who lived openly. You were a man about town. You became more of a celebrity than you had been already. You even made fatwa jokes during that period. Much later, yes. Much later. Still in this book, you say you have no regrets about living in this way.

Yeah. No, of course not. I've had a very, very good 25 years. Well, 23 of the 25 years. The last two, a little less good. No, I mean, I always wanted to get my life back and I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in a cocoon. One of the things about security is that if you wait for somebody else to tell you, it's okay now, there's no more problem, go about your business, then that day will never come.

Nobody will ever tell you that. And yet during that period, even though the official threat had sort of waned, there were still echoes of that. You heard it from other countries, from Iran itself. Yeah, but they weren't real because the thing that was dangerous was state-sponsored terrorism. And that had stopped. Did it surprise you that the rhetoric still, though, would echo here and there? I mean, the world is full of bad people.

Do you think about Iran? No, very little. I've been there. I mean, when I graduated from university in 1968, I had a friend with a car, and we drove from London to India. Back when you could. When you could. You could drive through the world. to India. Back when you could. When you could. You could drive through the world.

You could drive. You went through what was then called Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran. Gorgeous drive. What did you see of Iran? Well, we entered from the Turkish borders. We went to Tabriz and then Tehran and then down to Isfahan and Persepolis and Shiraz. It's a beautiful country. And I thought the people were beautiful. And so, yeah, I've been there. And I always felt that this very cultured, civilized place,

it's very cruel fate that the fanatical rule of the Atillas should happen there, to this very sophisticated population. With an incredible literary history. Incredible history of art and literature. And I suspect I'm not going back. Is there any sense in which you became a, not maybe the right words, but a perfect target because you have a Muslim name, because you say

you do not believe in God, because you are who you are. Did you kind of become a perfect target for extremists because of those things? Maybe. It was easy to demonize me for the reasons that you just said. And the demonizing was very successfully done, to this day. A lot of children are brought up to think of me as a kind of boogeyman. And I can't do anything about that. But yeah, that's true. And I tried to write in the book about there being these different entities bearing my name, versions of me.

And that is the very dark version of me. For example, after this attack and the loss of an eye, there is a figure in Islamic demonology who is a kind of one-eyed demon called the Dajjal. And if you check out that beautiful place, Twitter, you will find people saying, oh, now he's revealed himself as the devil that he always was. And Dajjal's character means they tell lies. Yes, they tell lies. They tell fictions.

Yes, and they're one-eyed. Yes, and they're one-eyed. Yeah, and they're one-eyed. So that feeds into the demonology that's been created around me. How does that sit with you? No, I mean, that's what's dangerous. That's what's dangerous because that's what,

if somebody swallows that, as it seems this young man may have, then that is a motivating force. I wonder what you think would happen if the Satanic verses were to be published today. Well, you know, I know there's this kind of idea that nobody would have the guts to publish it. I slightly don't agree with that because, you see, the book has remained, it is published consistently in more than 40 languages. And so publishers in more than 40, I mean, you know, the English language is multiple territories anyway.

And the book is constantly in print and publishers are printing it and reprinting it and putting it out there. But there might be more complaints against what might be perceived as an overstepping... Yeah, what's different now is social media, and the way in which social media can be galvanized into a mob with enormous speed. And that would be different. But there is a sense in which there are new areas and new parts of the population in the West that has a looser definition of what freedom of expression, what limits freedom of expression should have. it used to be that it was kind of old fogies like me who were conservative about what could be said and what was wrong to say. And young people were iconoclastic. And now it's the other way around. It's an older generation that still holds on to traditional ideas of free expression. And it's labeled by some as neoliberal.

Yeah, exactly. Those are just insults. We don's labeled by some as neoliberal. Yeah, exactly. Those are just insults. We don't have to pay attention to those. But the fact that there's a generation growing up which is willing to suppress speech which it doesn't like is extremely alarming because that simple definition of free speech, in order for it to be free, it has to include speech by people you don't agree with. Otherwise, not free speech. And there's an increasing feeling that that's a kind of wrong way of thinking and that it's better to suppress improper speech. But it's a debate that's even playing out, you know, at PEN America.

PEN America and in the universities around the country and everywhere. So what would you say to the progressive young person of any background who might say that sensitivity and respect for difference, particularly for the vulnerable, trumps freedom of expression. Yeah, well, I'd say they're wrong. And the reason they're wrong is that if you look at the history of censorship, censorship is always exercised by the powerful against the powerless, always. If you try to defend censorship because it acts on behalf of the powerless,

that's a very slippery slope because you're defending the weapon which is usually used against minorities and less powerful people. So it's, I don't know, it's what that exploded philosopher Karl Marx would have called false consciousness. You think you're doing something because it's virtuous, whereas actually it has the danger of being the opposite of what you think you're doing. Is it a losing battle getting that message across to today's generation? I don't know. I'll let you know. The battle ain't over.

In addition to rejecting this notion of fence posts or, you know, ring fencing, I think is the word you use, specific ideas, you also take the opportunity in this book to say that you are still, in your words, a godless bastard. Yeah. That we created God to embody our moral instincts. Why was it important to underline that again? Because it's true. You can imagine this. In an early phase of human development, the world is a mystery. And there are questions that people begin to ask themselves to which they have no answers. How did we get here? How did here get here? And it's easy to imagine a powerful being who is the reason that here got here. It's an explanation. And then what happens simultaneously is a question of, as societies develop, is a question about morals, about ethics.

Now that we're here, how shall we live? What is good? What is bad? What is right action? What is wrong action? And suddenly you've got this overarching being from whom you can argue that the rules come, the commandments. And you can see why human beings in the past, long ago, used religion to explain these two big things, the question of existence itself and the question of ethics. Well now we are at the point where whatever religion we may be interested in or not interested

in, their explanations of origins are not true. The world was not created in six days by somebody arrested on the seventh day. It didn't happen. The world was not created by a god churning the universe in a giant milk churn, etc. Some of these are very beautiful, these origin stories. They're kind of poetry of a kind, but they're not true.

What we know about up to a point is the origin of the universe. We probably can agree that there was a big bang and things came after that. But in the context of this book, why was it important to reiterate those? Well, you know, you have no idea how many people have asked me in the last 20 months if as a result of the miracle of my survival, if I've discovered religion.

And the answer is no. Because what I discovered was the miracle of science. The fact that this extraordinary job was done on my body, not just to save my life, but to leave me kind of functional, able to get up and walk around. A miracle, nevertheless. able to get up and walk around. A miracle, nevertheless. A miracle, but a miracle created by human knowledge,

not by the intervention. I don't believe that some divine hand reached down to protect me. Nor do I have any evidence. I mean, I believe in the evidence of my now I. And at that moment of near death nothing miraculous happened no pearly gates no fires of hell no heavenly choirs no tunnel of light no kind of sense of lifting out of the body none of that just in fact it was the opposite It was an intensely physical experience. I'd rarely felt so much in my body, you know, as in that moment when I thought it was about to expire. So, you know, religion didn't show up.

Yeah. And yet, towards the end of the book, you talk about the weaponization of religion. When it is forced on nonbelieversievers or when non-believers are, quote, prevented from robust or humorous expression of their non-belief. Where do you see that right now? Which countries? Well, all over the place. that right here in the United States, the power of evangelical Christianity is what was responsible for the destruction of Roe v. Wade.

That's a straightforward equation. Of course, in the Islamic world, it's different in different countries, but there are some places where very extreme versions of Islam, for example Saudi Arabia where Wahabi Islam is one of the most extreme variations or the Iran of the Atillas which is a very extreme version of Shia Islam. And India. And India where this new radical Hinduism that has emerged very powerfully discriminates against people of other religions and has the power to destabilize the country by bringing back kind of large scale sectarian violence. by bringing back kind of large-scale sectarian violence. You write, we are engaged in a world war of stories,

a war between incompatible versions of reality, and we need to learn how to fight it. How should we do that? Well, by coming up with better stories. I mean, I think one of the ways of understanding what's happening in the Middle East is that you've got two narratives. You know, you've got a kind of Israeli Jewish narrative about the Jewish homeland, and you've got a Palestinian narrative about their homeland, and they're fighting over the same patch of

land. And they seem to be incompatible narratives of something very close to incompatible narratives. And so the result is violence, war, death. And then here, I mean this is what the whole MAGA movement did. I've always thought that the thing about make America great again, I want to know when it was great. What's the date we're talking about that we're supposed to be looking backward too fondly? Is it when there was slavery? Is it before women had the vote? Is it before the civil rights movement? You know, what is it that we have to erase in order to make America great again? And of course, the point about the golden age myth is that it's always a myth. There's no such time.

But you can persuade people to swallow it if you do it right. That's what Putin's been doing with Ukraine. He's been selling his audience on a story of how the Ukrainians are Nazis and how there's a global conspiracy against poor old Russia. So whose job is it to tell better stories? It's all of us, you know. I mean, writers, journalists, politicians. We've got to come up with narratives that counter these narratives. You say that writers own the future.

Yeah, because books are what survives of us. I mean, just one little example. If we now think about Napoleon Bonaparte's Russian campaign, we think about war and peace. And Tolstoy kind of owns Napoleon's Russian campaign. You know, writers have no armies, no physical power in that way, and the actual physical bodies of writers are often sacrificed to power. But the work ends up defining the human race. And you only have to look back 100, 200 years and you see that it's the books that tell us who we were.

And the books of this time will tell the future who we were. That's really wonderful. I want to ask you a very personal question, if I may. I wonder, just going back to the idea of premonition, whether it wasn't perhaps your parents who had the original premonition when they gave you the name Salman. Well, they, yes, peaceful, you know, so true. And safe. And safe.

Survivor. Yeah, yeah. They knew a lot, my parents. I mean, even to invent the family name Rushdie, based on the philosopher Ibn Rushd Averroes, who had a life not unlike mine. Progressive thinker, had his books banned and burned. My father chose that name, handed it to me. I'm so grateful to talk to you again. Thank you. It's been very nice.

Salman Rushdie in New York in April 2024. His memoir is called Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder. You can find more information on our website cbc.ca slash ideas including a link to a video of the conversation which aired on the CBC's The National produced by Carmen Merrifield, Sean Brocklehurst with help from Nicole Brewster-Mercury and Jared Thomas. Many thanks to the whole team at The National and Pauline Holdsworth, and to Sharon Klein at Penguin Random House Canada.

This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.