The Ezra Klein Show - Best Of: Salman Rushdie Is Not Who You Think He Is

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

This is one of my favorite episodes of the show in recent memory. It’s a conversation with the author Salman Rushdie about the experience of losing control of your identity in the world. This happened to Rushdie in the most extreme way. But many of us know some milder version of this — and increasingly so in the age of social media. Rushdie’s story is hard to wrap your mind around. When he published his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” in 1988, he was a literary star. And then the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. In this episode, Rushdie recounts the ways that upended his world, creating a “shadow self” that he would spend years trying to escape. And he reflects on the different ways he’s wrestled with that shadow self — in the years following the fatwa and then more recently, after a 2022 knife attack that nearly killed him.This episode was originally recorded in April 2024. Mentioned:Knife by Salman RushdieMidnight’s Children by Salman RushdieBook Recommendations:Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Edith GrossmanOne Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García MárquezThe Trial by Franz KafkaThe Castle by Franz KafkaThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.htmlThis episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Mrinalini Chakravorty. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Today on the show, we're re-airing one of my favorite episodes of the last few years. Something that's not non-political, but about something very different than what we're thinking about in the current moment. My interview with Salman Rushdie about his book, Knife. I I feel like I've always known who Salman Rushdie is. Long before I read literary fiction, he just sat in my consciousness as the author of this eerie sounding novel called The Satanic Verses, a novel so somehow dangerous he had to go into hiding after the supreme Leader of Iran said he and anyone involved in it should be killed

for blaspheming Islam. So Rushdie sat there in the back of my mind for decades. I didn't think much about him. The whole story felt like this weird relic of the 80s. But then in August of 2022, I saw the news that a fanatic with a knife had tried to carry out the fatwa, had attacked Rushdie that a fanatic with a knife had tried to carry out the fadwa, had attacked Rushdie during a speech and nearly killed him.

There was confusion and panic. The attack happened in full view of the audience, with Sir Salman left injured, lying on stage, and eyewitnesses in deep shock. Witnesses say Rushdie's attacker stabbed him 10 to 15 times before members of the audience grabbed him and restrained him. Rushdie is currently on a ventilator unable to speak. According to his book agent, the 75 year old's liver was punctured. He suffered severe nerve damage to his arm and will likely lose an eye. Rushdie was attacked yesterday morning in front of roughly 25... Rushdie survived, though he lost an eye to the attack and the recovery and the rehabilitation was grueling.

And he began to write again. And his latest book, Naif, is about the attack. It's about his life. It's about his marriage. It's about his children. And I think at its core, it's about something else too. It's about the invention of other versions of him that became more real in the world than he was. Other versions of him that almost got him killed. And this

is what I now understand after reading Knife. What I now understand after I went back and read for the first time the satanic verses. I have never known who Salman Rushdieh is. And maybe not just him. How many people out there do I wrongly think that I know? As always, our email for guest suggestions and reflections, Ezra Klein show at ny times.com. Salman Rushdie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be with you. I want to begin with a story you mentioned a little bit offhandedly in the book, which is this story about the shadow by Hans Christian Andersen.

Yeah, the shadow, I think it's my favorite story of his. It's about a man whose shadow gets detached from him and goes away. For many years, he loses his shadow. The shadow has traveled the world, the shadow is quite sophisticated and cool, and in some ways is more interesting than the man. And the shadow returns, and the man and the shadow spend some time together,

and then the man meets this princess who he's very taken by and interested in, and the Princess decides that she prefers the shadow to the man, and actually the shadow manages to persuade her that he's the real thing and the man is the echo or the phony or the shadow. And so in the end, the shadow manages to arrange for the man to be executed. So the shadow takes over the life of the man. So what did that story mean to you?

Why put it in this book? It meant to me that a thing that happens more and more often, I think, is that a shadow self can separate itself from the person and end up becoming in some way more real than the original person. That people believe the shadow and don't believe the self. So if I'd asked you in, you know, 1986, 1987, to describe how you understood yourself,

what kind of person you were, what kind of writer you were, what would your capsule sense of Salman Rushdie have been? In the 80s, I mean, it was actually a very good decade for me, because it began in 1981 with the publication and success of Midnight's Children, which was important to me for a number of reasons. First of all, because it was my first literary success, and there's nothing quite like first success.

Secondly, that it financially allowed me to begin to live as a writer rather than having to work in advertising, which I'd been doing. And it also deeply reconnected me to India, which I worried living in London that I was kind of drifting away from those roots. And the novel was a very conscious attempt to try and reclaim them.

And that was actually what made me happiest about this reception of the book, was the way in which it was received in India, and the way in which it made me feel. The 80s were a very happy time for me, you know, I was doing well. If that's how you felt about you, who is the public you? I mean, I had become identified as one of a kind of rising group of British-based writers, writers like Ian McCune and Kazuo Ishiguro and Martin Amis and Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson and there's a bunch of us all roughly coming up at the same time.

And we got identified as this kind of special generation. And so there was that. I also had become perhaps a little bit more politically engaged than some of the others. So I had written and done things on television about racism in England and post colonialism, the remnants of the empire. And so I was also associated with that kind of subject.

And then came the Satanic Verses and it changed everything. When you began writing the Satanic Verses, what did you understand yourself to be doing? What kind of book were you writing? So I was writing these three stories. One was about a character with name Jibreel, which is the Indian version of Gabriel, who was a movie actor who's losing his mind and arrives rather dramatically as a result of an airplane

explosion in 1980s London at a time when the race relations situation was quite tense. And this is the period of Margaret Thatcher's government. And I guess what I thought I was doing was thinking about what happens to people when they migrate from one culture to another and how much of their identity is brought into question by doing that. You know, they're suddenly they're in a language

that isn't their first language and they're in a language that isn't their first language and they're in a community that doesn't know them. And they very often are in a belief system, surrounded by a belief system or systems which are different from their own. And so they face all these challenges. And I remember thinking, well, if that's what I think, then I should try and make the novel itself that kind of challenge. And so the question of religious belief and so on becomes one of the subjects of the book.

And Jibril having these dreams about the birth of a religion, and I thought I'd made sufficient distance because in the novel and in his dreams, the religion is not called Islam, and the prophet is not called Muhammad, and the city is not called Mecca. And all this is happening in the dreams of somebody who's losing his mind. I thought, you know, this is what we call fiction. Yeah, some people took it the wrong way. What is it literally in the book? What is the actual story you tell in the book that causes this offense?

Well, of course, the people who attacked the book had not read it. So there's that. But there is a well-known story that is in many of the traditions of Islam. To put it simply, there were three very successful, popular winged goddesses in Mecca at the time, whose temples were at the gates of the city. It's a big trading city, so people would come and go through the gates and they would make offerings at these temples, or put it another way, pay taxes. So the families that ran these temples were very wealthy and powerful in the city. And so the theory is that the prophet was offered a deal.

And the story goes that he comes down from the mountain and recites some verses which accept the status of these goddesses, the level of the angels. And then we don't know what happens, but it seems as if there was a lot of opposition to his statement from amongst the new faithful. And then after a short period of time that's unclear, he rejects those verses and he says that the devil spoke to him in the guise of the angel and that these were satanic verses which should be expunged from the Quran, which they were, and replaced by other verses in

which he discounts these goddesses. So that's the episode about a possible temptation and then the rejection of the temptation. And I thought, you know, that exists in many religious traditions. And actually he comes out of it quite well. So I mean, I came across this story when I was at university, when I was at Cambridge, and one of the things I was studying was early Islamic history. And I came across this story, and I remember thinking, you know, good story. And that was 1968.

Twenty years later, I find out how good a story it was. When the book comes out, I was going back to try to understand the timeline here. The fatwa against you, I hadn't understood this, anybody involved in the publication of the book, that doesn't happen for five months or so. Five or six months, yeah. So what is the initial reaction to the book? When people first get their hands on it, what do the reviewers say? How do you understand, because there's always a difference, how do you understand that people have understood the book? Well, the reviews were good, but not sensational. There was one review I remember which in retrospect seems amusing where the reviewer said, what's

all this stuff about Muslims doing in a novel about London? I guess now they know. That one doesn't age well. But you know, it was nominated for the Booker Prize, so it did pretty well. And actually, I'm told that the one or two English language bookstores in Iran were happily stocking it without any problem. And then came the moment of the fatwa, and then things got much nastier. Khomeini called for the death of British writer Salman Rushdie. We want Rushdie to be hanged, do you see? I might force Salman Rushdie and kill him, you know?

I would give you a chance! Rushdie, who comes from a Muslim family himself, went into hiding, moving to another location every time Scotland Yard's special branch thinks it prudent that he do so. To the best of your understanding now, why does the the fatwa happen? Well, there's a political reason why it happens, which is that chronologically the moment in Iran at which it happened was very soon after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, in which essentially

a whole generation of young Iranian people had died for no gain. And the revolution was probably more unpopular and in greater danger at that moment than at any other moment. And I think frankly, Khomeini was looking for a way of rallying the troops. And unfortunately, I became it. And there's also in my reading, some amount of competition at that time between, as it is actually now, between Saudi Arabia and Iran on who will be the leader of the worldwide Muslims. For sure. And they competed over their opposition to my book as well.

Certainly, initially, in the UK anyway, a lot of the demonstrations that began to happen around the book were funded out of Saudi Arabia, as far as I'm told. And then the Iranian fatwa came and hijacked it. So they kind of piggybacked on what initially had been the Saudi-led protest and took it over. During the course of the nine years or so of the police protection, I was told maybe six times that there were serious assassination attempts underway, that

people had entered the country with an intention of carrying out the threat. Other people involved with the book in other countries were attacked and killed, which is something I did not know. Yeah. I mean, the worst thing was the Japanese translator of the book, who was a college professor who was actually a specialist in Islamic history and art, and who translated the book into Japanese, was murdered one night near his office on campus in Japan. And my Italian translator was attacked at his residence, and fortunately survived.

And my Norwegian publisher was shot several times in the back while getting up in the morning to go to work. And he also kind of miraculously survived. I felt horrible, you know, because they felt like these were proxy attacks, you know, that they really wanted me, they couldn't get at me, so they got at them. And I remember calling William Nygard, who was my Norwegian publisher, to apologize to

him. And he said, Salman, don't apologize, I'm a grown up. I knew that I wanted to publish the Satanic Verses and I'm very happy that I did. And then in a kind of wonderfully publishing way, he said, and guess what, I've just ordered a very large reprint. I guess in publishing that is the best revenge. I mean there's occasions where I felt myself in the company of really brave people and I think if you've just been shot three times in the back and your reaction to that is to

order a reprint, you know, that's courage. So I had not read the satanic verses until preparing for the show with you. And I think if you had never told me anything about it, I would never have assumed there had been any reaction to it at all. It reminded me as a book, more than anything else as I read it, of White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which I think the causality goes the other way. Yes, I mean, she said you're an influence on her, so I just understood that because I read it first.

It's a very fun, stuffed, manic, exciting, imaginative novel, but it's nothing like what I had believed. No, it's true that the novel that was invented for public obloquy doesn't actually exist. And I've had it happen to me, I can't even tell you how many times, that people who, like you, have finally got around to reading the book have said to me, well, where's the problem? Where's the dirty bit, if you like?

They don't see that it's there. The other thing people say to me is who knew it was funny? Well, that was actually my first reaction. I didn't expect the tone of the book at all. It wasn't the tone I assumed of the book. It wasn't the tone I assumed of you. It's very funny. It's very alive.

You know, before the satanic verses, the books I wrote before that, people thought they were funny. People would write about me as a funny writer. That was often mentioned in what was said about me. And after the satanic verses, for a long time, nobody wrote about me as a funny writer. It was as if because the thing that had happened to me was not funny, that was kind of dark and obscurely theological, it was assumed that I must be dark and obscurely theological. It was assumed that I must be dark and obscurely theological.

It was as if the characteristics of the attack were transposed onto the person being attacked. So I became the personification of the characteristics of the attack. And that other me who was funny and antique and interested in mythology and fantasy and politics and history, that person vanished. In a way, the biggest damage that the attack on the satanic verses did to me was not physical danger, it was a damage to people's thinking about my writing. And a lot of people, I think, who might have enjoyed the book and might have enjoyed my books in general, have been put off by the kind of shadow of the Islamist attack. But it was almost universally true that the people who attacked it did not read it.

I mean, I remember seeing a television interview when I was still living in England with one of the leaders of the Indian Muslim protest against the book. And the television reporters asked him if he'd read it. And he said this kind of rather wonderful thing. He said, no, he said, I don't need to walk in the gutter to know that it contains filth. So that was the kind of attitude. You don't need to walk in the gutter to know that it contains filth. So that was the kind of attitude. You don't need to read it. It's just bad.

And so in that way, the book, no less than the person, can have a shadow. Yeah. It was really upsetting to me, which is why in those early days, you know, there were a lot of people who were defending me, my right not to be murdered and so on, but I kept saying to them, could you please defend the text, defend the book? And not that many people did that. In fact, there was a kind of gag going around in those days that the book was impossible to read, unreadable, which was a way of excusing yourself from reading it. So we talked a bit about who you were understood as publicly before the book, right? What the sort of public salmon was.

And as I understood you describe it, you're a kind of post-colonial writer to the extent you're a man of politics, a man roughly of the left, critical Thatcher. Who emerges now? Well, what happens is that entire self that had been how I was seen and how I thought of myself for a decade was just erased overnight. It's as if it didn't exist. And what was created instead was this irresponsible, selfish, arrogant, bad writer and bad person who had deliberately set out to offend the great world religion and only just about deserved to be protected

from harm. Only just about. So I ask this because there's a dynamic I want to trace here about the way when there is a chasm between the self and the public shadow, the book and its public shadow, that people feel a need to harmonize the two, not side with one or the other, but assume that there must be some logic that connects the two, not side with one or the other, but assume that there must be some logic that connects the two. So talk through that reaction of the West, the kind of people who wanted to harmonize.

It was very shocking. I mean, first of all, I had been quite a vocal critic of the Margaret Thatcher government. And then that was the government that had to offer me protection. So on the one hand, there were accusations of hypocrisy. Oh, you have been knocking the government until they have to save your skin and then you take the protection and save your sorry ass. There's some of that. There was just some of just straightforward political opposition.

There were people whose politics were not like mine, actually members of the government cabinet who said rude things about the book. And then there was a very upsetting kind of literary strain to the hostility. Writers I wouldn't expect, like John Berger, Germaine Greer, John Le Carre, one of that group, said nobody can insult a great world religion with impunity, as if to say if you do that, then you don't deserve to be safe. But I remember being very surprised to find Jimmy Carter on the side of the detractors. That was almost more shocking to me than the Islamic attack because I thought, you know, the Iranian regime is a tyrannical authoritarian regime. And if it behaves in a

tyrannical authoritarian way, it's not entirely surprising. But to have Western artists and intellectuals doing that was very, very upsetting. And in India too, in India too. When my ethnic origin is that my family was originally Kashmiri in the north of India. Oh, Pakistanis would say not so much the north of India. But we were Kashmiri family. And I've written a lot about Kashmir. I wrote about it in Midnight's Children. I wrote about it in Shalamar the Clown. And I now know because a kind of jihadist mindset has increased in Kashmir, that if

I were to go there, I might not be safe. And that feels horrible. The place from which my family comes is a place to which I can't safely go. Both my parents are buried in Karachi, Pakistan, and there's no way I can ever go and visit their grave. This kind of thing is just deeply troubling to me. I mean, obviously you do not like the version of yourself that was created that was worthy of being murdered or worthy of at least the overreaction of being murdered. What was your relationship, what is your relationship to the more sainted public version of yourself, the symbol?

I mean, you know, I mean, thank you very much. It's nice for people to be nice about you. But I'd never felt symbolic. You know, the statue in the harbor, that's a symbol. I feel like a working artist, and I would like to be known and judged by the work that I make. Having said that, I was involved in the free speech issue before anything happened to me. I mean, I was working with the British branch of Penn, trying to defend various writers in trouble in various parts of the world. I was doing my bit for that effort.

And then a lot of writers' organizations really came out to bat for me, you know, really stood up for me. And I was very grateful for that. And so that became a part of how I saw myself. I have to say a secondary part, because I still think the person who sits alone in a room and makes things up is who I really am. Tell me a bit about that dynamic, because you kept writing.

Yeah. How did your writing change under this pressure? Well, I tried to not let it change. I remember thinking very consciously quite early after the fatwa and all that. Of course, there was physical danger, but there was also artistic danger. There were ways in which this attack could destroy me as an artist. It could frighten me and so then I would not write anything risky, I would write safe little frightened books. Or it would fill me so much

with anger and a desire for revenge that I would write revenge books. And I told myself that both of those would be the destruction of my artistic independence and whatever quality I have as a writer, it would destroy. I think probably one of the greatest acts of will that I've ever performed in my life was to try and not let my writing be knocked off track by the attack on the satanic verses. You moved to New York what year?

2000. And that then becomes another shadow self that you talk about some in the book, where you develop after moving to New York, a reputation as a, I think you call it, a Psalm on the party animal. A party boy, yeah. And I'm truly not.

Would you own it if you were? No, I actually don't really like big parties. I'm sociable, that's true. I am quite sociable, but I like to see my friends one at a time or two or three at a time so we can actually talk to each other. But what happened was, when I started living in New York, is I realized that it wasn't so much a question

of me being frightened, there's people being frightened of me, people being scared to be around me because of the threat of danger hovering like a dark angel over my head. And I thought the only way I can get rid of that is to behave in a way that is not scared. If people can see that I'm not being scared, then maybe they'll stop being scared. And so I deliberately embarked on a policy of public visibility, going to places where I knew I'd be photographed

and where, you know, the New York Post would write about me. And it worked, because after quite a short period of time, people thought, oh yeah, he's just here and he's around and about and it's fine. And that was what I wanted to achieve. And then it kind of went too far.

And I turned into this butterfly, this social butterfly, which in my view, I'm not really. But so that's interesting to me, the way you had to act in relationship again to these public selves, right? Now, you're the one who has to reconcile through your own behavior. You have to change who you are to try to change who people think you are and what comfort they have around you. Yeah. I'm going to try something a little tricky here.

And I don't in any way want to trivialize the violence, the terror that you've lived through. I was struck with a thought that you have for decades now lived in the most extreme possible version of what seems to me to be a very modern condition in which little scraps of yourself, scraps of things you've written or echoes of interpretations of things you've written ricochet around an internet or a world and create this other version of you that people begin to believe in. Yes.

And I think this happens, again, in a very small and much less terrorizing way to people all the time on TikTok, on Facebook, on X. They say something or they said things or they've been a person and soon a version of them emerges that is more real to other people than they are. Yes. Do you think this is a more common thing? Well, I certainly agree entirely with how you describe the creation of false selves by this new weapon of social

media. I've often thought that if these things had existed in 1989, I would have been in far more danger because the speed with which material can be transmitted is so much greater, and the way in which groupthink can be created and mobs can be created would have enormously escalated the danger. At that time, the most sophisticated method of transmission was the fax machine, and that kept the lid on it to some degree until Khomeini blew the lid off. I know that there are two or three graphics containing absolutely false quotes from me, things I've never even come close to saying, which keep cropping up. People keep retweeting them and repeating them. And even though I have once or twice said, look, this is nonsense, I never said this. That doesn't stop it. It just keeps going.

So there are quotes ascribed to me, views ascribed to me, which I don't hold, which are actually antithetical to things that I think, but they're out there. I mean, I think to some degree, it's always been the case before social media that there's a disconnect between the private self of the writer and the way in which they're publicly perceived.

I mean, I've wrote a little bit about this. I said various writers, Gunter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, they all had this sense of there being a public self which wasn't quite them, but which was how they were seen. And I had a kind of magnified version of that, I think. And social media certainly helps to magnify it. I mean, I think on some level, that has always been true for everybody, right? There is the person we are, although I'm not somebody

who believes that that is a very stable concept. No, that's an unstable concept. And then the way we are seen by our families, by our friends, by our lovers, by our antagonists, by our colleagues, whoever. The thing that feels different, something extraordinary typically had to happen for the distance between your private self and your public self to matter at any significant scale.

What strikes me is that the experience at a modest level has been democratized. The number of people who are not famous, who are not a well-known writer, who do not have demonstrations in the street against them, who can nevertheless become the main character on social media, who can see a version of them just ricochet through local high schools as people post something about them on Facebook or on Instagram and then everybody else is commenting, I mean, kids commit suicide around this all the time now.

Yes, they do. It does feel to me like a difficulty of being just alive now. I mean, when these things arrived, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I thought this is very interesting. And it's a new way of talking to each other. And certainly if you're a writer, it's a way of talking to your readers without any intermediary. And that's enjoyable.

And for a moment I participated in this and was quite enjoying it. I think maybe it changed and the world changed in the way that you're describing. But I suddenly began to think, this is a room containing people that I don't want to be in the room with. And so I backed away from it very dramatically. One of the things I was thinking about reading your book is I know people who have gone through public scandal, who didn't deserve it, who hadn't done the thing or there really was no thing.

One thing I've noticed is many of them go through a period, sometimes don't even get out of the period, of believing they must somehow deserve it, right? They do the reconciliation in their own head, that even if they didn't do the thing that they're being denounced for, or it's not even clear what they're being denounced for, they almost have to believe they did something deserving of it for their reality to make sense to them.

They begin. They do the violence to themselves of believing in the shadow self, right? More than they still believe in themselves. Did that happen to you? Yeah, it did right at the beginning. I began to believe that two things, that first of all, there was a kind of category mistake about the satanic verses, which was being treated as a work of polemical fact, whereas actually it's a work of imagination and fiction.

If I can just explain that this is not fact, this is fiction, that people would say, oh yeah, we get it now. And that was kind of foolish, but I thought it. And then I thought, if I can just explain in interviews and essays and so on, who I am and what I thought if I can just explain in interviews and essays and so on who I am and what I thought I was doing and why I believe it to be completely legitimate, that people would again go, oh gosh, we made a terrible mistake.

Yeah, he's a nice guy after all. Let's stop. And then there was a period, I mean about a year or year and a half into the story, when I was very, very depressed, I was in really quite deep depression about everything and didn't see how it would ever end. And I thought maybe what I have to do is to reach out to the Muslim community and try and apologize, you know, and I did.

And it rebounded very hard in my face. And actually my sister who I love and is closer to me than anybody else in the world, is one year younger than me. She describes herself as my much younger sister. Called me when she heard me making these apologias, you know. She said, what the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind?

And I thought, you know, yes, I have. Yes, I have. I'm behaving in a deranged way. And that felt to me like hitting rock bottom. I hate that this is true about culture right now. I don't know that I've ever seen it be the case, or at least very rarely seen to be the case, that apologizing, whether the person did something or did not do something, helps. Because what apologizing seems to me to do now is it gives people the license to believe

that it was all justified in the first place. Exactly. It's you submitting to the reality. That's why in a way I think there's a crazed power to people like Donald Trump who exist in a world without, I think, personal shame. Because they don't apologize, they're able to keep the instability of the different realities coherent. I never lost the election, I never did anything wrong, I never did any of it.

So there never needs to be a moment where the people who are on their side have to reconcile the sort of admission of wrongdoing, whereas the people who try to come out and be decent people and say, I did do something terribly wrong here. Suffer. Suffer. No, shamelessness is the great public weapon of our time. Yes. If you really have it,

and yes, of course he does in spades, you can do what he's done, which is to spend a lifetime getting away with it. I mean, not just since he's been in politics, but way before then. I mean, getting away with it. I mean, not just since he's been in politics, but way before then, I mean, getting away with it is his great skill. And the tool that he uses is absolute lack of shame. And I mean, I would put in a miniature way,

the ex British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the same bag, absolute, total liar in everything he says and does, and totally shameless about it and gets away with it until he didn't. I mean, I do think this, we live in this age, right, where you have a global community, an algorithmic global community, and communities discipline in the first instance through the application of shame, through shaming each other and eliciting shame in each other. And that's a supercharged dynamic in modern life. And so if you happen to be immune to it, right, if you happen in ways that are, I would suspect, usually quite personally

destructive, to be immune to it is often a very important disciplining emotion. It's a superpower. It becomes, as you put it, a superpower. Yeah, and I find myself withdrawing from this modern world as much as I can. And so this is maybe a function of being almost 77 years old, but I really go less and less towards social media.

I barely use it now, and every time I go there, I kind of wish I hadn't. So I think maybe I'll just, whatever years are left to me, manage to do it without being a part of the modern world. So let's go quite a bit forward in time. It's 2022, it's before the Chautauqua event where the attack happens. At this point, who are you to you and who do you think you are at that point of the public? So I genuinely thought that the risk was in the past and I had 22 years of evidence for that. So it wasn't unreasonable to believe that. But at this point I had more or less completely regained, let's say, the life of a writer,

you know, where I was doing everything that writers get asked to do. You know, I was doing book tours and literary festivals and lectures and readings and all of that, especially after near sequestration. It was very pleasant to be back in the world. I mean, it used to be, you know, that some airlines were scared to carry me and people in restaurants would look uneasy if I walked in the room and I was going to Yankee Stadium and concerts at the garden and just leading an ordinary life and felt very okay doing it. It used to be the case that every time I published a book, the writing about it would begin by restating the stuff that happened

around the satanic verses and the new book would be judged in the shadow of that event. And that kind of stopped happening. As I went on writing and publishing more books of very different kinds, people began to respond to my work just as work, not as the latest creation of this dark individual. So where are you on August 12th? There, I mean I just finished. But I mean physically where are you? Physically, oh, I was in New York City

and then on August the 11th I had flown up to do an event at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, in Western New York. Which is deeply ironically an event for asylum for writers. Yeah. What had happened was that my friend Henry Reese had for many years, like 20 years, been running a kind of asylum program in Pittsburgh.

He had a whole little street of houses which he made available to writers from various countries who needed a safe place. And they, Chautauqua, had invited Henry to come and talk about that. And he asked me if I would come and have the conversation with him. So I'd actually gone there to talk about him and his project and the success of his project. And then, yeah, it turned out that I was the one who needed protection. What happened?

Well, we had just come out on stage. And I mean, the Chautauqua Amphitheatre is a very large space. So it actually, when it's full, it I believe can seat like 4,000 people. And there were probably something like 1,500 people there in the morning, 1030, 1045 in the morning. Very beautiful, sunny day in August. And Henry and I came out and were introduced by someone from the institution. We were sitting in chairs on the stage and almost the moment the introduction was over, I mean, we really had no time to start our conversation because I saw this man approaching

rapidly from my right. And to my right, there was a small flight of stairs, like four or five stairs, and he came sprinting up the steps and attacked me. When you are writing through this in the book, you talk a bit about freezing. And you have a line that I've been thinking about since I read it where you write, This is as close to understanding my inaction as I've been able to get.

The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real. What do you mean? Well, I mean that we all live in a picture of the real. We all have a kind of sense of how things are. And that sense of how things are is our reality. And then when something calamitous happens, you know, somebody arrives in a school with a assault rifle,

somebody arrives in a church with a gun or in a shopping mall, you know, everybody in those locations has a picture of what they're doing. If you're in a church, you're there for reasons of belief and worship. If you're in a church, you're there for reasons of belief and worship. If you're in a shopping mall, you're there to shop. If you're in a school, you're there to be at school. And that's how you see the world. And the explosion of violence into that picture destroys

that reality. And then you literally don't know the shape of the world. And very often I think people are paralyzed and don't know what to do. How do you act in a moment when the thing that's happened isn't a part of the narrative you think you're in? And that's what happened to me. I thought I was froze. The attack was a knife attack. And you write that a gunshot is action at a distance,

but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy. What's intimate about it? Well, it's right up against you. I mean, this guy was, there wasn't even an inch of space between him and me. And he's not shooting from a distance, he's not shooting an arrow, he's right up in my face, sticking a knife at me.

And then of course I fell down and he was on top of me. So that's about as intimate as you can get to be underneath somebody who's on top of you. I mean, there are other occasions when that happens and those are more pleasurable. I realized when I read you write this, I thought about the intimacy of it for you. And it's only hearing you say it

that I think about the intimacy for him. Yeah. I'm not saying I can imagine standing 50 feet away from somebody and shooting them, but the idea of charging them and sticking a knife jumping on them, sticking a knife in their neck and their eyes slashing at them. I don't know what stage of mind you have to be in to make it possible to do that. You're trained your entire life socially. I mean, I feel weird asking somebody for the time.

It's just too close up. Yeah. Some of the book is about trying to understand him. What do you know about the attacker? Like, how did he end up there? And how did he end up there with the level of hatred or determination? Well I know very little.

I mean there have been just a couple of newspaper reports on which I base my knowledge of him. There was one interview that he gave from prison to the New York Post in which he said a little bit about his life and then there was a second interview, I forget in which journal that his mother gave about her horrified reaction to what had happened. And what seems to be the story, as far as I can piece it together, is that his parents were of Lebanese origin, they moved to the United States

and he was born and raised in Jersey. His parents separated, his father went back to Lebanon, his mother stayed in New Jersey. His parents separated, his father went back to Lebanon, his mother stayed in New Jersey with himself and his sisters. And until he was approximately, I don't know exactly, but approximately 19-ish years old, that's all he was. He was a kid growing up in Jersey and had no criminal record. And then at about that time, he chooses to go to Lebanon to visit his father. And according to his mother, when he first got there, his father lives in a village which is very near the Israeli border and is a very strongly Hezbollah village with billboards

of Hezbollah heroes around the streets. His mother says that when he first got there, he really didn't like it, he wanted to come home right away. But he stayed only for about a month. And he came back a month later and according to his mother had completely transformed as a different person and was now angry with her for not having taught him properly about religion. His mother's house in Fairview has a basement, and he went and sequestered himself in the

basement, lived separately from everyone else, playing video games and watching YouTube videos. Essentially he lived a kind of, as far as I can see, a pretty solitary kind of loner's life for like something like four years between his visit to Lebanon and his decision to attack me. And somehow in that period of time, he becomes the kind of person who can commit murder. And then at a certain point, he sees something on Twitter from the Chautauqua Institution announcing their program of events. And he saw that I was listed amongst the program of events

and then decided to make his plan. Wait, he sees an advertisement from the Small Literary Foundation? Yeah. And on that your life turns? Yes. The efficacy of Twitter advertising? This appears to be the case.

The idea that he could become someone who could murder seems in some ways less improbable than that you could end up as his target. This is somebody born after the satanic verses if I'm not wrong. And you're just not there anymore. There's a lot that has happened. The war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq, right? So much has happened. The subject has changed.

The subject has changed. How does he end up focusing on you? I mean, how does he end up even knowing who you are? This is what I don't know. I mean, there's an absence in my understanding of him. I mean, I can guess that while he was with his father in this very Hisbullah dominated village, that somebody might've mentioned my name as a bad guy,

anti-Muslim, whatever. And it may be that that was triggered by his seeing something on social media about my upcoming talk. But I don't really know. something on social media about my upcoming talk. But I don't really know. I mean, actually, I remember saying to my editor at Random House that if I was to write a story in which somebody by his own admission had read only two pages of somebody's writing

and seen a couple of YouTube videos and then were to decide to murder that person, my editor would say to me, that's not convincing. It's not enough motivation. Yeah, you say in the book that your attempted murder seemed under-motivated, which is one of the funnier, I mean, darkly funny lines I've read in a while. You know, I was thinking about Iago O'Nothello, that the only thing that happens to Iago is that he's passed over for a promotion.

That's it. That's his beef. And because of that, he decides to destroy the lives of two people, Othello and Desdemona, for no reason. Just bad. And I often wondered about, is there such a thing? Is there such a thing as a person like that who is simply evil, just a bad guy, doesn't need much of a motive? And the reason that doesn't quite work in this case is because such scraps of information

as we have about him prior to his visit to Lebanon are although he was a perfectly nice person, no problem, well liked, then the transformation is what's interesting. But there's a way in which, in addition to him being a bit of a safer to you, he's trying to kill some other version of you. The thing that struck me so much about it, he doesn't actually know anything about you. He didn't really case the target. No, he didn't do his, he didn't do any research. He seemed very, you know, very uninterested.

It's very casual. Very uninterested in knowing who it was that he'd decided to murder. Just because, I guess, he'd heard from people he was influenced by that I was some kind of demonic figure. You know, there is a very effective degree of demonization that has taken place across the Islamic world, in which there's a lot of people who grow up thinking that I'm a kind of boogeyman. On the other hand, his own family were not like that.

They were not fanatics. They were perfectly secularized American citizens. So I don't know where he got it from. You decide not to go to try to interview your attacker. I think the core of the book, and in some ways the apogee of the book, is this imagined dialogue between the two of you. And one thing you say to him in this imagined dialogue is, quote, I know that it is possible

to construct an image of a man, a second self that bears very little resemblance to the first self, but the second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again until it begins to feel real, more real than the first self. And you imagine saying this to him, almost as a way of helping him understand what he was doing. You are creating his shadow self, right? You are creating a version of him that is now more real in the world than he is. I hope so.

Tell me about that. Well, I included this anecdote about Samuel Beckett being the victim of a knife attack. And he almost died. And in his case, he actually did go to confront his attacker in court and said to him, why do you do it? And all the man was able to say was, I don't know, sir, I'm sorry. And I thought that's useless. It doesn't get you anywhere.

And I thought, even if I was permitted by his lawyer or whatever to have a meeting, I would get some banality. I probably wouldn't get an apology because there's no indication of any remorse. But I would get some form of ideologues, sloganized answer, which wouldn't get me anywhere. It wouldn't answer for me this hole in my understanding of him, but how can somebody with so little knowledge of a person agree to murder them?

So I thought maybe the best way to do this is to use my skill, my skill of imagination and storytelling to try and get inside his head and at least create a character that I can believe might do something like this, whether it's his real character or not to actually become secondary. I want the fictional character.

I mean, I understand that as a storyteller, there's now a whole, the center of your story, right? A character who no longer made sense to you. Yes. Even as he had become a central character. Yes. Was it therapeutic to make, I don't want to say him correctly motivated, but fleshed out enough that the story works?

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't use the word therapeutic, but it was a way of taking control of the narrative. It was a way of saying, this is my narrative. You know, I tell the story. I read the book and we haven't spoken in detail about the rest of it, but the rest of it, I understood it as a very deep, intense assertion of the reality of your actual self. I mean, the book is physical and intimate and in your rehabilitation and in your hospital stay and in the things that had to happen for you to stand again and walk again in the moments you almost died, in the moments that medication turned on you and created

terrible and often somewhat grotesque physical maladies. And there was a way in which you couldn't read the book without this deep confrontation with your life as you actually lived it. I mean, the book felt to me like a deep insistence that the Salman Rushdie who mattered was the one who actually lived through all this. Well, I hope that people read it that way, so thank you. Because for one thing, I rarely in my life felt so deeply physically connected to my

body as I have in this life felt so deeply physically connected to my body as I have in this last year and a half. It was such an incredibly physical thing that happened, both the attack and the recovery and the psychological ramifications of all of that. I thought I have to get into this. I can't actually present the story in a way that makes sense to people unless I reveal and undress in public. And it felt a bit, I always think publishing a book is a little bit like undressing in

public, but this one really is. The memoir form was more or less invented by Rousseau in his Confessions. And ever since then, I've always thought the principle of the autobiographical memoir is tell as much truth as possible. If you're not going to tell the whole naked, unvarnished truth, don't write the book. There are the parts of the book that are literally like that, where you are undressed, you're being operated on, you're in a surgical room. And then there are the parts that actually felt more like that to me because they were

so intensely vulnerable. And there's a dimension to the book, and you come back to it a few times, where you somewhat insist on your own life as a tragedy. You somewhat admit a kind of defeat. And I want to talk about that. And I want to see, rather than having me read this, I wanted to have you read it. It's from Naif. The most upsetting thing about the attack is that it has turned me once again into somebody I have tried very hard not to be. For more than 30 years, I have refused to be defined

by the fatwa and insisted on being seen as the author of my books, five before the fatwa and 16 after it. I had just about managed it. When the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about the attack on the satanic verses and its author, and now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject. I think now I'll never be able to escape it. No matter what I've already written or may now write, I'll always be the guy who got knifed.

The knife defines me. I'll fight a battle against that, but I suspect I will lose. Yeah, I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. Yeah, I was going to ask if you still feel that way. Up to a point I do, yes, because it took me so long to shake off the shadow of the Fatwa itself in those years and to have people begin to respond to my books just as books, whether they like them or not, anyway, it doesn't matter, but that shadow wasn't hanging over people's response to my work.

And now here it is again, you know, and truly I don't know if whatever I write next will be read in the light of this attack or whether people will be able to read and judge and enjoy it on its own terms. This book, even that paragraph, struck me as a different answer to the question than I think you've sort of admitted to giving. You've written a sort of autobiography before, a memoir called Joseph Anton, which you did in the third person. This book is in the first person. And it doesn't really seem to me this book is about being the writer of books.

Its book is about being a person, right? Like a person in a physical body who could die, who has a wife he loves, who has children. It just forced an understanding of you as a person. Yeah, it's a very bad reason for having to write a self-portrait. But it is intended as a self-portrait, and with, as I say, as much openness and undefendedness

as I could manage. Did trying to write this self-portrait, did it change your sense of yourself? Yeah, that's a good question. No, I think it just in some way clarified it. One of the questions I ask myself in the book is, given that you've been by great good fortune and medical skill, given a second act that you weren't supposed to have, how are you

going to use it? What will you do with that gift of time? And the reason why so much of the book is about love and family is because that's what's right at the front of my head now. You know, in whatever time I have left, I mean, I hope it'll be a while. That's what I want to focus on, that and work and frankly, nothing else.

I mean, I think, you know, look, this is the 22nd book. If there aren't any more books, that's okay. There's a lot already. Probably nobody will ever read all 22. So there's enough of me out there on the shelves. I mean, I hope there are some more, but the priority now is to lead a life of loving and being loved.

That's what I think this thing has taught me. I think that's a nice place to end. So then, always our final question, what are three books you would recommend to the audience? So I would recommend Don Quixote. For many people, the first great masterpiece in the novel form, and for many people, the greatest. Especially also because there's now a wonderful new translation of it by Edith Grossman, which makes it very accessible to English readers.

Previous translations were frankly a little dull, but this one is fantastically vivid and alive. So that, yeah, I mean, I will have to say, because I think it's the greatest novel of the last, however long, 100 years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And please read the book rather than watch the Netflix version. Garcia Marquez himself refused to allow the book to be filmed during his lifetime. And it's a great shame that his heirs have overruled that. But 100 Years of Solitude is one of the most joyful books ever written.

From the first sentence you are plunged into this world of magic. And what would be the third? I mean I think you know of the three great masters of the 20th century, Joyce, Bruce and Kafka, we live in Kafka's world. So I would probably say The Trial or The Castle or both of them. So that's four books. Salman Rushdie, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of the Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle

Harris, our senior engineers Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, our senior editors Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Kristen Lin, and Aman Sahota. We've original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski, and Shannon Basta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Andro Straser and special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Rinnalini Chakravorty.