The Current - Salman Rushdie on the 27 seconds that nearly ended his life

Episode Date: February 24, 2025

The man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie on a New York stage in 2022 has been convicted of attempted murder and assault. In a conversation from last year, Rushdie tells Matt Galloway about writing to move past the attack and what he intends to do with his “second chance” at life.

Hi, I'm Saïd M. Dahoma. I'm a pastry chef with a neuroscience PhD. This year, the Great Canadian Book Debate is looking for one book to change the narrative. The books on this year's show all have the power to change how we see, share, and experience the world around us. I'm championing Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liu in Canada Reads 2025. One book to change the narrative. For more on Canada Reads, go to cbcbooks.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt here. Thanks for listening to The Current, wherever you're getting this podcast.

Before we get to today's show, wonder if I might ask a favor of you, if you could hit the follow button on whatever app you're using. There is a lot of news that's out there these days. We're trying to help you make sense of it all and give you a bit of a break from some of that news too. So if you already follow the program, thank you. And if you have done that, maybe you could leave us a rating or review as well.

The whole point of this is to let more listeners find our show and perhaps find some of that information that's so important in these really tricky times. So thanks for all of that. Appreciate it. And on to today's show. After a two-week trial, the man who stabbed the author Salman Rushdie was convicted on Friday of attempted murder and assault. He faces a sentence of more than 30 years in prison. Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage in Chautauqua, New York in August of 2022. He'd been living under threat since the Aïatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa in 1989, condemning him to death over his novel, the Satanic Verses.

And for years, Rushdie lived in hiding under police protection. But 24 years ago, he made the decision to change that and live openly and defiantly in New York City. That is where I had the chance to speak with Salman Rushdie. In April of last year, when he released his memoir, it is called Knife, Meditations on an Attempted Murder. Here's our conversation. I had the chance to speak with Salman Rushdie in April of last year when he released his memoir. It is called Knife, Meditations on an Attempted Murder.

Here's our conversation. How are you doing? I'm doing surprisingly well. What is surprisingly well? Well, it means that, you know, I mean, considering what happened, I'm quite surprised by the shape I'm in. And not only me, but I think a lot of the medical folks

that I've been seeing over the last year and a half are also surprised. Apparently I have remarkable powers of recovery. Who knew? Apparently. Yeah, who knew? What about having a book like this? I mean, this isn't a book that you wanted to write, but then you wrote it. No, but then I did want to write it.

For a long time, I didn't want to write it. But at the point at which it became clear to me that I had to write it because I couldn't really focus on anything else, I seemed foolish to think about something else. I think the hardest part was writing the first chapter, which is the chapter which describes the attack. I think once I got through that hardcore moment, the rest of it kind of began to flow. It's fantastic though.

It is really quite something. Thank you. You write in the book about, as you said, in that first chapter, in extraordinary detail about that attack. And you say that you can still see the moment now in slow motion. What is it, when you think about it,

what is the thing that you can still see? Well, I see two things. First of all, this running man. Then I'm seeing stars, you know, because I'm being attacked rather violently. And then I have this image of myself on the ground with a spreading pool of blood around me. pool of blood around me. And then I'm dimly aware of being put on a stretcher and rolled out on a gurney, you know, rolled out to where there's a helicopter waiting. And I do remember

the helicopter. And I do remember those medical helicopters, they're really quite small. And there's not very much room inside. So when I was in there, with like two other people crouched around me. And I do remember landing at the hospital. And then I guess there must have been an emergency team that came rushing up

and they would have put anesthetic mask on me and after that I don't remember anything for the next many hours. But I remember, those are the images I have. You write in the book about the time that the attack took, these 27 seconds. How do you understand that time? Well, I wasn't thinking about time at the time. I mean I only know about 27 seconds because that's how it was

reported in the press afterwards. It seemed like a very long time that he was on top of me, because I mean, I fell down, came down on top of me. It just seemed like time seemed to just stop. At first, when people came to my rescue, at first Henry Reese who was on stage with me and then members of the audience, I wasn't fully aware of that. And then there was a moment where I became aware of a kind of pile of bodies

sort of somewhere over to my side, sort of heaving pile of bodies on top of the attacker trying to hold him down. But no, time went into a very strange place there. I just felt like I was floating free of time. Did you feel like you were going to die? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I did quite clearly. I felt that was almost certainly what was gonna happen.

And I mean, on the one hand, it felt, I wasn't afraid of it. It just felt like that was probably what was gonna happen. But there was a sadness involved in it because of dying far from home in a strange land, you know, in a company of strangers, far away from everybody I cared about. That felt bad. But it seemed very probable

that that's what was gonna happen. What do you make of the fact that it was your fellow citizens, people around you, people who had come to hear you, who leapt on this, not the police, not security, who leapt on the stage just to save you, but also to knock this guy down. Yeah, I think it's rather wonderful.

I mean, it's like witnessing the best of human nature almost simultaneously with the worst. Because if it were not for those people, I don't know their names, I wouldn't recognize them if they walked in the room. But their altruism, their selflessness, is what saved my life. You dedicate the book to them.

Yeah, because they're facing an armed man with a knife and they're unarmed members of an audience. And yet they did what they felt they needed to do. It was a genuine heroism. And I remember, you know, last year when the Pan-America gave me this courage award, I said at the prize-giving, I said, you know, I'm not the one who was brave.

I'm just the one who got attacked. The people who were brave were the people who came to my defense. And I said, you know, I feel like I'm accepting this award on their behalf, which I still think. You told your wife, Eliza, that the most upsetting thing is that the attack turned you into someone you tried not to be.

Yeah. What did you mean by that? Well, you know, what happened all those years ago in 1989 after the first attack on the Satanic verses and the police protection and all that, there was so much noise around me then that there were versions of me being invented by the media and by Islamic radicals and by certain members of the literary establishment, which didn't feel like me, but there they were on the front pages of the newspapers.

I had no real defense against that at the time. I remember thinking that the only way I'm going to get back to being somebody like the way I see myself is just to go on working, go on writing, bury this event in books. The Satanic Verses was my fifth published book, and Victory City, which I finished just before the attack, was my 21st. This one's the 22nd. So three-quarters of my life as a writer happened after the fatwa, and I felt had managed to bring me back into people's minds as a writer, you know, as an artist. And I was really pleased about the fact

that the last two or three books that came out came out without really any reference to the events of 1989 or thereafter. When people were reviewing Victory City or Quichotte or the books that came before that, they were just talking about the books. And some of them liked it, some of them didn't like them, and that's all right.

Is that a relief? Huge relief because that's what I'd been trying to get back to. And now weirdly, this attack has pulled me back into that other guy, the guy who got attacked. And I don't want to be there. What I got into the business to do was to make things up, was to write fictions and just tell stories and to do it as well as I could. Writing about myself was never the plan, and yet I've now had to do it twice. I hope this is the end of that and we can get back to making things up again. You talked about remembering being in the helicopter.

When the helicopter landed, apparently the trauma surgeons, the people who greeted you, didn't think that they could save your life. That's so they told me later. Your son talks about how people die after they get stabbed once and that you were stabbed. 14 times. Why do you think you survived?

Well, I think partly because he missed a number of vital organs which could have dealt with it in a single... For example, there was a slash right the way across my neck here, but it didn't seem to cut the artery. There was a stab wound on my neck right here. That also missed the fatal place. There are three stab wounds down the center of my torso, but they missed the heart.

And that's what we call good luck. And I mean, I've always thought the biggest piece of good luck was, well, I mean, the worst thing was the knife in my eye, but the knife in the eye went quite, I mean, it went as deep as the optic nerve, which is why there's no possibility of saving the vision. But as you know, the optic nerve is what connects the eye to the brain. And so the distance is about a millimeter.

I mean, your fingers are almost together. Yeah. Showing that. That's not very much distance there. And the knife went that far, but it did not travel that extra millimeter. And so there's no brain damage. And that's that. I mean, people keep telling me about miracles.

That's the miracle, it seems to me. You don't believe in miracles. Not as such. You said you were lucky. Yeah, I mean, I don't believe in like divine miracles. I believe in the miracles of medical science, man-made miracles. I think that's what happened to me. I was lucky and then I was saved by my medical science. And I'm also in a way lucky in that my body seems to have unusual powers of recovery. And just why the doctors were kind of surprised that I recovered as well as I did.

I mean, just why the doctors were kind of surprised that I've recovered as well as I did. And that again is nothing in my control, you know. I guess you could argue that there's some willpower involved, but essentially it's just that this particular construction inside which I live seems to repair itself quite well. It's such an intimate thing. I mean, and this goes to the title of the book, Knife.

I mean, it's not being shot. It's not being blown up. It's somebody inches away from you. Inches away from you. It's lying on top of you with a blade. Yeah, I mean, it is, it's a, I felt this intimate conjoining of, you know, me as life and him as death, you know, the conjoining of life and death

in this colossally close way for half a minute, which is a long time. You wanted to meet him, right? And then you were talked out of it. Yeah, well, I wanted to meet him because I wanted to ask him why he did it. And my wife, Eliza, was not keen on the idea. And frankly, I don't think his lawyers would have

permitted it anyway. But then I was reading a story about when Samuel Beckett was the victim of a knife attack, and he actually did go to the court where the guy was being tried. And he said to him, why do you do it? And all he got in reply is a man said, I don't know, sir, I'm sorry. And I thought, that's not helpful. That doesn't tell you anything useful. And I thought, well, probably if I did get a chance to ask him that question, I would get some banality or some kind of cliched ideologue remark, and it wouldn't really help.

Is that why you created the chapter in which you imagine what a conversation or interrogation is always would be like? Yeah, I thought maybe I can do better by imagining myself into his head than I would if I actually had the chance to talk to him because I don't think he'd be that forthcoming. How do you understand?

I mean, because he admitted, and you don't name him in the book. No. But he admitted that he'd read very little of anything that you'd written. And that's kind of the case for a lot of people who have called for your death. Almost everybody, you know.

I don't think the Ayatollah Khomeini even saw a copy of the book, let alone read it. How do you understand why you've become a target? Well, you know, I used to get really upset about the fact that people were condemning the book and its author without bothering to read it. And then I thought, if you look at the history of attacks on books, that's almost always the case. The people who called James Joyce a pornographer had obviously not read Ulysses because, I mean,

he's a great writer, but I don't think he arouses sexual interest. And people who called Nabokov a paedophile after Lolita had clearly never read Lolita, which is a profoundly moral kind of anti-paedophile book. So then I thought, well, maybe that's how it has to be that people who decide to attack works of literature need to not inform themselves in order to do it. And if you actually inform yourself, it's harder to take up that kind of extreme political position. Jamie Placent Canada is facing a near unprecedented set of political challenges right now.

I'm Jamie Placent and on Frontburner, the daily news podcast that I host, we're covering those stories five days a week. We try and bring clarity to Donald Trump's overt hostility to our country and how that has thrown a wrench into our looming federal election. So if you're looking for a show to help guide you through an increasingly chaotic world, find and follow Frontburner wherever you get your podcasts. You say in the book that this man was wholly the product of new technologies like social media.

You call them group think manufacturing giants. Yeah, well, I mean, he'd spent four years in a basement watching videos and playing video games. That's all he'd done. And apart from occasional outings to the gym, as far as one can tell, he'd locked himself in his basement of his mother's house and his mother and sister weren't allowed to come and see him there. He led this kind of monastic life.

What should we do about that? I mean, should the people who create those groupthink manufacturing machines, should they be held liable? Oh, and I don't know about holding people liable, but I do think that social media has become one of the most pernicious things about modern society, which allows a kind of mob attitude to be manufactured at high speed.

And, you know, when it all started, I thought this is really interesting that you can communicate directly with your readers and you can have a conversation with people you don't know without any kind of mediation. You were very active on Twitter. I was, and then I decided it was, I don't know whether I changed or it changed. I think some of each maybe. But suddenly I thought this is a room full of people that I don't want to be in a room with.

And I thought, well, I'll leave the room. Aside from leaving the room, what do we do about it? I have no idea what to do about it. Don't ask me what to me for solutions to problems. I don't have any solutions. After the attack, I moderated this panel in Toronto called Freedom to Read, Freedom to Write. It was about freedom of expression.

Your friend Ian McEwen was on it. Oh, yes. One of the things that he talked about was how what you had gone through, and the Fatwa in particular forced the literary community to relearn the language of free speech. Yes. How well do you think those lessons were learned?

Forgotten. Nobody learned anything long-term. They learned something short-term and everybody forgot it. And now everybody's really happy to talk about preventing certain kinds of speech because they don't like it. And my old school attitude is that the defense of free speech begins when somebody says something you don't like.

It doesn't end there. That's the beginning. That's the starting point. And if you are unable to defend the free speech of people that you really dislike, then you don't believe in free speech. The point about it is that it's a marketplace in which everybody gets to shout. If you say only nice people can shout, then the question is who decides who the nice people are.

He said that institutions need to stiffen their arms in some ways to protect that, that you're seeing, he was concerned about what he sees. Well, he's right. I mean, I'm completely in agreement with him. I think there's a weakening of resolve all around. And there's beginning to be an acceptance of the idea that if you upset somebody, you should be silenced.

And I mean, the extension of that, because many things upset many people, is that in the end, nothing can be said. Either everything can be said or in the end, nothing will be possible. And in societies where speech is controlled in authoritarian societies. What people want most is the ability to say what they think. So you can tell the importance of free expression by what happens in its absence. And it's just bizarre that if we're in the fortunate position

of essentially possessing it, that we're trying to give it up. Where do you see the greatest threats to free expression right now? Well, they're coming from both sides. There's still the traditional threats of the right-wing conservatives. It's still there. They're still trying to ban Toni Morrison from libraries

and William Faulkner. And a lot of that's about race, but not all of it. But now there's a progressive attack as well that wants to deplatform or cancel you if you offend against whatever the sacred car of the week is. Your friend, Hanif Kureishi said that nobody would have, these are his words,

nobody would have the balls today to write the satanic verses, let alone publish it. Well, I don't know about write. I mean, I already did it, so I can't pretend that I want to do it again. What about publisher? We're sitting in your publisher's office. Well, I see the reason I don't agree with Hanif is this,

that ever since then, from that day to this, the satanic verses is being published. It's being published constantly in every English language market and in like 45 translations and it's being reprinted and put out there. So the idea that it wouldn't be published is contradicted by the fact that it is being published consistently and kept in print by publishers

all around the world. So maybe that's a little too pessimistic. Do you believe that a book, if it's not that book, that a book that might push buttons, that might upset somebody still would be? Well, now they've got all these things like sensitivity readers. I'm grateful that I've never yet been subjected

to a sensitivity reader. What is a sensitivity reader? A reader who reads your book to see if it will offend anybody's sensitivities. And if it does, then something's changed. Then something needs to change. That publishers employ them now. Nobody's dared to send my book. What would happen if your book went through the sensitivity reading

machine? Either they would keep their mouth shut or I would open mine. But I'm not interested in that. I remember Christopher got asked, he said something like, you know, if you come up to me and say that you're offended, he said, I would reply, I'm still waiting for you to make your point. There's no, nobody has a right not to be offended. You founded the Penn World Voices Festival. Yeah.

It has seen, as you know, several writers of name pull out this year because they want to see the organization take a stronger stand in support of Palestinian writers. What do you make of what they've said? I mean, you know, truthfully, I haven't stayed in the loop that much, but what I think is that one of the reasons

we founded that festival was because there had become a kind of in the aftermath of 9-11 and the American actions in Afghanistan, there had become a kind of disconnect between the intellectual discourse of the United States and the intellectual discourse of a lot of the rest of the world. And we thought that wasn't particularly good for the United States and it wasn't particularly good for the rest of the world. So maybe we could try and be that bridge. And the point about the festival was disagreement. That was the point of it, that people should come with many views and let's have the conversation

in civility in a public arena. And I think that's still the reason for it. I don't even know the names of the people leading this protest, but I'm sure they believe they're acting for the good. But essentially, what they're doing is demanding that everyone else use exactly the language that they dictate. And if they don't do that, then those are bad people. I mean, I was one of nine former presidents of Penn who signed a conciliatory letter which said, look, let all the voices speak. And we were called ridiculous and wrong and pathetic, et cetera, for it. Everybody's temper is very high.

And when tempers are very high, mistakes happen. The thing that I worry about most is Penn does an enormous amount of good work around the world defending writers all over the place. It supports Palestinian writers as well, by the way. To destroy or damage the most effective literary organization in the country seems like shooting yourself in the head. It doesn't mean that one fewer bomb will drop on Gaza. It doesn't mean that one child's life will be saved. So yeah, I guess that's what I think. I think it's, you're pointing your gun

in the wrong direction. Is that idea of disagreeing without being disagreeable, is it possible to have those kind of hard conversations now? It should be. But is it, I wonder? Well, everybody's very angry right now, so that makes things harder. But it damn well should be if we're a civilized society.

What do you see as your own responsibility to speak up for freedom of expression? Well, I do my bit, you know, I do my bit, but I mean, my main responsibility is to my work. I mean, what I'm, I have this fantasy of sitting under a tree by a river with a notepad, writing, and not giving a damn about anything else. And that fantasy is what I aim to bring into being from now on in the time. One of the questions I

ask myself in this book is it feels to me like I got given a second chance at life, that I'm not actually supposed to be here. The odds against my being here were very high. And yet I kind of bucked the odds and here I am. So if you get that kind of a second act, how do you use it? That's how I plan to use it, sit under a tree with an apple and a notebook and write pretty things.

Stay tuned. I probably won't succeed. I just wonder if people will believe you when you say that. Well, I believe you. You believe you. But even I know that I've tried that before and failed. So we'll see. You have that epigraph at the beginning by Samuel Beckett.

We are no longer what we were before the calamity of yesterday. How are you different? Look, physically, I'm different because I'm not as strong as I was. I mean, I'm aware of, yes, I've recovered a lot, but I haven't recovered my physical strength to anything like the degree that I had before. So I have to be physically careful. I have to be more careful, you know,

be careful going downstairs. I have to be careful doing things that you wouldn't normally have thought about. But the other thing is I think to do with, to do with one's acquaintance with death. You know, we all know that it's gonna happen to all of us, but unless we're particularly morbid by nature, we don't spend our lives

dwelling on that subject. But I think when you've had a really good close-up look at it, when it's like an inch away from you, it kind of doesn't go away. It kind of stays with you. So I'm aware of... I'm not that particularly depressed or anything about it, but I'm aware of that shadow being there that wasn't there before. And I think that's just, I have to learn to put up with that until it steps out again and I have to challenge it to a game of chess. Before I came down to see you, I was speaking with your friend, Deepa Mehta. Oh yeah. She said that your sense of mischief remains intact.

Is that hard? I mean, again, when you look death in the eye, is it hard to hang onto something like that? No, it's actually kind of easier to see the ridiculous in life because you know that pretty soon you're not gonna have it. May as well enjoy it while it's here. What you wanted to do is get back to,

as you said, making things up, make believe. Yeah. Have you started to think about that? Yeah, I haven't got a big thing. I haven't got any, I don't have a novel in my head. I've written a shorter fiction. It's kind of a ghost story. A ghost story?

It's kind of a ghost story, in ghost story? It's kind of a ghost story, in part. That's all I'm gonna say. You've kind of earned the right to be able to do whatever you want, I think. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think I always felt I had that right. I think we all have that right to do whatever we want.

But I mean, my view is, you know, 22 books is a lot. I mean, I'm not gonna write another 22 books. And I have a suspicion that the really big fat books are behind me. I don't think I've got a 500-page book in me anymore. I quite like this length of 200 pages. It feels like you can say something and then stop. So I hope there'll be a few more. But I don't have the next big idea yet. But that second chance, I mean, that's not something that you would waste.

The biggest other thing about the second chance is it gives you an instruction not to waste your time. That's what you think it told you? Yeah, don't mess around. Use the time you've got. We look forward to whatever you do next. I'm glad that you're here. Thank you. I'm glad I'm here too.

Salman Rushdie, thank you very much. Thank you. Salman Rushdie's memoir is called Knife. We spoke last spring on Friday. His attacker was found guilty in court. His sentencing is scheduled for April the 23rd. And Knife will be turned into a documentary by the Oscar award-winning winning director Alex Gibney.

That is scheduled to come out sometime later this year apparently.