In 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran called on Muslims to murder Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s novel, Satanic Verses (a reference to apocryphal additions to the Quran), portrayed the prophet Muhammad in an unorthodox light, offending the Ayatollah. This event led to years of heightened security and protective detail around the author.

Although Rushdie apologized and created a new life in New York, a fatwa is irrevocable. On October 23, 2022, he took the stage in upstate New York to speak about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm. As he took the stage, a would-be assassin with a knife rushed the stage and attempted to murder him.

Knife is the author’s extended meditation on the event from the moment of violence through medical interventions, to the reclaiming of his life. In this memoir, Rushdie seeks to own his narrative. He spent years building a life that was not defined by the fatwa. How would he continue now that religious violence had struck so deeply?

I have read a few of Rushdie’s novels, most recently Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, but Knife surpasses them. Rushdie reflects on his experience with a phenomenologist’s eye, bringing the reader back to the originary experience:

I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James’s last words were, “So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.” Death was coming at me, too, but it didn’t strike me as distinguished. It struck me as anachronistic. (6)

Knife is a profoundly honest story of death and life, violence and love. In the end, it’s a story about hope: that even the most obscene trauma can be overcome.

Rushdie, Salman. Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder. Alfred A. Knopf, 2024.