Renowned author Salman Rushdie recently announced he is releasing a memoir entitled Knife about the stabbing attack he suffered on Aug. 12, 2022 which left him blind in his right eye.
His attacker was a radicalized young man from Fairview, New Jersey named Hadi Matar, who has since pleaded not guilty to assault and attempted murder.
Rushdie has been a target of Islamic terror ever since his publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and the ‘fatwa’ or death penalty issued upon him by Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The fatwa was called due to alleged blasphemy against the religion of Islam in the novel’s pages.
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Rushdie, who is a critic of organized religion and an ardent supporter of freedom of speech among other civil liberties, has never apologized or backed down from his work. Yet he had to go into hiding for a long period after the fatwa was issued–and as the recent stabbing showed, he is still not in the clear.
The stabbing occurred in western New York state at the pro-free speech Chautauqua Institution, where Rushdie was about to deliver a talk. Just before Rushdie began, the attacker rushed onto the stage and stabbed him over a dozen times. The Chautauqau Institution doubled-down on its free speech mission and praised Rushdie for remaining steadfast in his views and insisting on the rights of speakers and artists.
Salman Rushdie is releasing a memoir about the horrifying attempt on his life that left him blind in his right eye. The book is titled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder” and will be published April 16. https://t.co/sN4owSIQgH
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 11, 2023
Rushdie has since recovered from the attack, despite having been blinded, yet has expressed his inability to write fiction in the aftermath. Just as in the fatwa years, Rushdie says he can only write soberly about his real existence, which previously culminated in his memoir Joseph Anton (2012).
“This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said of the 2022 attack in an interview with The New Yorker. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
His forthcoming 256-page memoir Knife will be published in America by Random House, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Earlier this year, the same publisher released his novel Victory City, which he had completed before the stabbing incident.
“Knife is a searing book, and a reminder of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable,” Penguin Random House CEO Nihar Malaviya said in a statement. “We are honored to publish it, and amazed at Salman’s determination to tell his story, and to return to the work he loves.”
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