‘Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.” So insists Salman Rushdie in Knife, his “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, written after he almost lost his life in a ferocious assault in Chautauqua, a small town in upstate New York, where he had gone to give a talk in August 2022.
As Rushdie rose to speak, a young man rushed towards him wielding a knife with which he inflicted terrible wounds “to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere”, excruciatingly severing the optic nerve of Rushdie’s right eye. The talk he never gave was to have been about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.
