One year and eight months after Chautauqua's assassination, British writer Salman Rushdie has released his memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, revealing for the first time to the public that he survived on August 12, 2022, and his recovery since then. If the wrath of the Islamic world and the ensuing hunt for Rushdie when the Satanic Verses were first published more than 30 years ago still caused controversy in the literary world and all sectors of society at that time, then more than 30 years later, the sudden assassination really achieved Rushdie's "heroic" significance. Although, for his part, Rushdie himself rejects any symbolism attached to the outside, telling the story "is to acknowledge what is happening in my way, to take control of it, to make it mine, to refuse to be merely a victim." I want to respond to violence with art".
Elephant in the room
In his latest memoir, The Knife: Reflections on an Attempted Murder, Indian-British writer Rushdie recalls a horrific experience that happened to him a year and a half ago. It was the first time he had confronted the near-fatal assassination in such detail: 27 seconds, 15 knives — the 15 knives that forever changed the trajectory of his life — at the Chautauqua Research Center in Chautauqua, New York, on August 12, 2022. Until then, he had been one of the three great British literary immigrants, a valiant fighter who challenged religious power with his pen, and the target of the eternal fugitive Iranian fatwa, after which he lost an eye and could not regain the function of his left hand, and the fatwa finally caught up with him thirty-three years later. Twenty-seven seconds is enough for Rushdie to read his favorite Shakespeare's "Sonnet No. 130") ("My lover's eyes are not at all like the sun / Coral is much redder than her lips / If the snow is white, her breasts are dark brown...... However, I dare to swear to heaven that my lover / is better than a beautiful woman who is praised as a fairy"). However, 27 seconds on the stage in Chautauqua gave him only a shocking nightmare: "I had a deep knife wound on my left hand that severed all the tendons and most of the nerves. I had at least two deep stab wounds on my neck, one through the center and the other to the right. There is also a wound on the face, also on the right. If I look at the chest, there is a row of wounds in the middle, there are also two cuts on the lower right side, and one on the upper part of the right leg. One wound on the left side of my mouth and another on my hairline. And the knife ended up in my eye. It was the most brutal blow, leaving the deepest wounds. The knife went all the way into the optic nerve, meaning that it was impossible to save the eyesight, and it disappeared completely. Unable to read it, Rushdie, with his usual humor and wittiness, wrote that his first thought after the attack was "Oh, my beautiful Ralph Lauren suit."
The process of treatment is just as painful. Rushdie spent nearly two months in the hospital, initially in the intensive care unit of a tertiary trauma center in Erie, Pennsylvania, and later transferred to a Manhattan rehabilitation center closer to home. Those days were as etched in his memory as a knife wound: the police officers who had been sent to protect him chatting and laughing all night outside the door, the nurses waking him up at 5 a.m. to change his bandages, dizziness, low blood pressure, urinary tract infections, and many vivid and terrifying dreams haunted him. Rushdie remembers one of the dreams about the Duke of Gloucester having his eyes gouged out in "King Lear," and the other from the opening scene of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel's film "An Andalú Dog": a cloud drifts past the moon and turns into an eye-slitting blade. Even after returning home, he had to report to the hospital almost every day, and every part of his body that needed treatment corresponded to a different specialist, and "everyone had to sign various rehabilitation work forms". At a hand therapist, he underwent seven months of rehabilitation. The wound on his right eyelid was split at one point, and in order to make his meal less uncomfortable, he needed to have a prosthesis placed in his mouth. "It's a book I'd rather not write because I did it with one eye and one and a half hands. Rushdie said. Happiness in suffering has become inevitable. "Dear reader, if you have never had a catheter inserted into your reproductive organs, do your best to keep this record blank. In the book, Rushdie jokes about the time he has to rely on a urinary catheter to get by. When he mentioned one of the surgeons, he spoke in a particularly pleasant tone, as he had an "incredible foodie name – James Beard." He jotted down his prostate exam: "'Ah. 'Double 'Ah'. More 'ah'. He also laughed at his weight: He weighed 240 pounds before the attack and lost 55 pounds in a few months, "not recommended," he wrote. It is as if he is looking at himself with blind eyes, and another healthy eye allows him to continue to pay attention to the outside world. He thought of the writers who had been stabbed with the same knives as him: Samuel Beckett, who had been stabbed by a stranger while walking on the streets of Paris in 1938, Naguib Mahfouz, who had been stabbed by extremists in the streets of Cairo in 1994 — "What is this? A club?" but looking closer, he was saddened to see his friend Martin Amis die while he was recovering. Another friend, food writer Bill Buford, nearly died of a heart attack, and the poet and novelist Paul Auster was diagnosed with cancer. "Many times since the attack took place, it has made me feel that death is lingering on the wrong person. ”
But should death have found him? Rushdie, he said, had repeatedly reflected on himself why he had failed to defend himself on the stage at the Chautauqua Research Center — was it because he was 75 years old and the attacker was only 24 years old? But on other days, I told myself, don't be stupid, think about what I could have done then, and the closest thing I could understand to my inaction was that as the object of violent crime, I was going through a crisis of understanding of reality like everyone else. In other words, the moment the violence struck Rushdie, he could not immediately tell that it was real and immediate. "Reality disappears and is replaced by something incomprehensible. In the long days of recovery, his re-examination of 27 seconds and 15 knives, his jokes about hospital life, and his retrieval of personal relationships have all become an attempt to understand after the fact. The "knife" can have many meanings, Rushdie writes, as a weapon, of course, as an art installation in books, films, and paintings, or, as a metaphor for understanding. "Language is the kind of knife that pierces the truth. I wanted to respond to this attack with the power of literature—not just my own writing, but literature in general. ”
Ghosts of the Old World
It's like being dragged back in time by a guy who "tried to enforce the hunt order thirty years ago" – in the words of the British writer Blake Morrison, "it seems that he has not counted 16 works since the Satanic Verses, and that 'ordinary old novel' has become a theological hot potato". Rushdie was discouraged, but not very angry. He called his attacker, Hardy Matar, a 24-year-old extremist from New Jersey, A, short for a series of even more unseemly names. "My Assailant, the Assassin who attempted to assassinate, the Asinine who assumed about me, and had an almost fatal date with me," Rushdie wrote, "I would have addressed him more politely as 'A'." As for what I call him privately at home, it's my own business. Rushdie recounted everything he knew about A: Before the attack, A had spent several nights in Chautauqua, sleeping on the streets, and confirming the scene. He carried a fake driver's license with the pseudonym "Hassan Mughniyeh," borrowed from Imad Mughniyeh, the former No. 2 figure in Lebanon's Allah party. He lives in the basement of his mother's house in New Jersey all year round, loves to play video games, and enjoys watching Netflix. YouTube videos were one factor in his radicalization, and another, his mother suspected, was a trip to Lebanon in 2018 to visit his father, who became reticent upon his return, blaming his mother for not raising him to be a "strict Muslim." He also read some of Rushdie's speeches here and there, flipped through a few pages of the Satanic Verses—just a few pages, and then decided that the author was "evil."
A did not understand Rushdie at all, just as Rushdie could not understand why, after all these years, A still worked tirelessly to carry out the order issued by the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini and refused to admit his guilt. At the end of "The Knife," Rushdie imagines a long series of conversations with A, on topics ranging from radicalization, hatred, laughter, culture, to gym membership, motherhood, and the New York Giants. Rushdie's Socratic questions, those that tried to lead Matar deeper into his hateful thoughts, were only exchanged for brief replies, lengthy insults, or silences. George Packer, an American writer and journalist, wrote in The Atlantic. Parker argues that Matar's story is essentially a template for a story that people are all too familiar with: "A frustrated lone traveler wants to make a glorious mission." But as the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner has written, Matar also symbolizes a ghost from an older world of punishment that Rushdie once thought had been left behind. "We are from Allah and we will return to Allah. I now inform all the brave Muslims of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses, an anti-Islamic, anti-Islamic prophet and anti-Qur'an, and all editors and publishers who know its contents, are sentenced to death. I appeal to all brave Muslims, wherever they are, to kill them without hesitation, so that no one will dare to insult the holy faith of Muslims in the future. Back on February 14, 1989, it was the fatwa issued by Iran's Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini to Rushdie on the grounds that Rushdie had playfully "blasphemed" the Islamic prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses, published the year before. In fact, Khomeini's fatwa has no legal basis. One can only barely find the words in Qur'an IX, verse 61: "Someone harmed the Prophet and said, 'He is a hearer.'" You have to say, 'He listens to you and does it better for you.'" He believes in Allah and believers, and He is the mercy of those who believe among you'. Those who hurt the prophet will receive a painful punishment. Some argue that Khomeini's posthumous order may have more political motives than the rhetoric that "blasphemy or apostasy is in the preserve of Islam", for example, by "clearly emphasizing the conflicting political and intellectual traditions between the two civilizations" in order to warn young people in the Islamic world of the "dangers of the West" and to win support for the Islamic revolution among the Sunnis, who make up 90 percent of the Muslim population. The bloodshed and impoverishment of Iran brought about by the recently concluded Iran-Iraq war has turned a large part of the Sunni population away from Ayatollah Khomeini and his Shia faction.
In any case, Khomeini's fatwa has succeeded in stirring up public outrage against Rushdie in the theocratic state. Myriam Renaud, a professor at DePaul University's School of Religious Studies in the United States, explains the importance of fatwas in the Islamic world as a whole: "Despite the Qur'an, the Hadith, and the law books, there are still situations in daily life where some of the above resources cannot provide guidance, and this is when the fatwa is necessary. In a sense, they reflect the visions, needs, or fears of individual Muslims and communities. Renault pointed out that the fatwa itself is not binding, that Muslims are not obliged to follow their guidance, and that the power of a fatwa comes only from the trust and admiration of the people in the clergy or institution that issued it, but as a result, "like any person in power, the fatwa can use or even abuse his authority to give instructions for personal political ends." Perhaps this is what a secularist intellectual like Rushdie, who was born in British Mumbai, educated in England, and lives in the United States, really finds it difficult to understand. He was against that symbol of arrogance. In 2023, PEN America awarded him the "Centennial Courage Award" for "what he represents and continues to represent, and which is the fundamental purpose of the organization – freedom", but Rushdie said unceremoniously that he does not see himself as a symbol of anything, "I have never felt symbolic." I feel like I'm just here. I'm just Ken". In a recent interview with The New York Times, he mischievously borrowed a track sung by actor Ryan Gosling at this year's Oscars, which was his answer to the world and to himself.
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