I never cared much for Salman Rushdie’s work. I had tried to read The Satanic Verses not as the promising novel everyone said it was, but as the symbol it inevitably became when, instead of writing a book review, Ayatollah Khomeini decided to write an execution order. The fatwa started what Christopher Hitchens described as the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom, freedom of speech in particular.
My relationship with fiction already strained, I became one of those readers Rushdie identifies in his most recent book, Knife – Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, 2024), as never having gone past page 15 of the Verses. I had little interest in the literature stemming out of the post-colonial immigrant experience in Britain and, in the end, could not invest in a novel purely to discover the basis on which a theocracy would justify issuing a decree for the assassination of its author.
But, after several riots and assassination attempts, years of living underground, guarded by the UK Special Branch, not to mention many books, it became impossible not to develop a degree of interest in Rushdie. Where had he been hiding, how did he find the courage to reappear, to travel and lecture? Insecure, yet defiant, Rushdie told David Remnick that at some point he had come to feel that “all that” was a very long time ago, and that the world had moved on.
Move it did, yes, but not forward. In August 2022, over three decades after Khomeini’s death order, the 75 year-old Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York minutes before he was about to deliver a speech. He was stabbed repeatedly, suffering horrific injuries including the loss of his right eye.
In Knife, Rushdie does not name his assailant; he refers to him only as ‘the A’, to cover what he says are less decorous references he uses in the privacy of his home. Hadi Matar, born in California to Lebanese parents, had not bothered to inform himself about the man he had decided to kill. “By his own admission”, writes Rushdie, ‘the A’ had read “barely two pages of my writing and watched a couple of YouTube videos of me, and that was all he needed.”
That Matar knew so little of Rushdie is indicative of the shallow digital life most people live these days. But it is not as jarring as the fact that – according to Ayatollah Khomeini’s son – his father had never read The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was actually a political ploy to assert Khomeini’s authority in Iran at a time when he was both physically and politically weak. Khomeini, it turns out, was less a fundamentalist and more of an ordinary populist.
Knife is Rushdie’s attempt to understand the latest attack and to expose the ludicrousness of theocratic politics. Parts are gory, others, where he imagines a conversation with Matar are awkward. But you cannot but admire the calm word-by-word revisiting of every blow and of every rehabilitated step.
Not merely a recording of a reluctant expert’s struggle, this is also an analysis of the new-found audacity of the populist onslaught on liberal thought and freedom of expression. Only last week India’s government sought the prosecution of Rushdie’s fellow Indian-born writer Arundhati Roy for comments she had made about Kashmir over a decade ago.
Art, Rushdie claims, challenges orthodoxy, it sets the artist’s personal vision against the received ideas of the time, the cliches and ideologies that depend on invisible sky gods. He calmly dissects and re-assembles the battle of stories, old and modern, and satirises the new malevolence. Good writing, he argues, will always outlast such ideologies and calls for the overturning of “false narratives of tyrants, populists and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live”, and not die, or, indeed, die for.
By documenting his ordeal, Rushdie has also afforded himself the chance to hit back at those who had joined forces with the Islamic attack on him in 1989. John Berger, Germaine Greer, Roald Dahl, even curiously, former US President Carter. And, to extend his gratitude to those who did come to his support. Among them his close friends Martin Amis and Hitchens who at the time offered the most lucid assessment on the subject: “It was a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved: In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defense of free expression.”
The tensions Hitchens identified feel deeper and harsher today. Fatwas may no longer be necessary but the large ignorant crowds that were once steered onto the streets are today unleashed as digital mobs to riot on large online platforms.
It is where populist autocrats and their armies of influencers stab away at artists, writers, journalists and activists by spreading disinformation and hatred, always in an effort to silence them. As captive users of these poisoned and unregulated platforms ourselves, we are faced with a choice: become participant-observers in the rioting spectacle by consuming the illiberal sloganeering narratives or, resist by shunning the online trash completely, stepping back and returning to the study of the readings. Rushdie’s book and its cutting verses are as good a place to re-start.
Photo: Euronews
Nicholas Karides 