Salman Rushdie’s Life and Art after his Near-Assassination
Salman Rushdie survived his assassination attempt to testify against his would-be killer. Rushdie's memoir Knife details the aftermath of his near-murder.
In May 2025, Salman Rushdie’s would-be assassin, Hadi Matar, was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Matar stabbed Rushdie at an event at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. He rushed the stage and stabbed Rushdie 15 times, injuring him but miraculously not killing him.
Rushdie was in the middle of a tour promoting his upcoming novel, Victory City. After he recovered from the attack, he wrote Knife, a memoir of his recovery and the love story that brought his current wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths.
Knife is an intimate look at what recovery from such a horrific attack demands of the survivor. It also includes lessons that onlookers like us should draw from his experience to prevent future outbreaks of violence in response to art.
Practical Questions First
Whatever lofty ideas about how to change society follow Rushdie’s near-assassination, there’s no getting around the curiosity about what almost being killed is like. Rushdie answers bluntly near the book’s beginning:
“Let me say first what did not happen. There was nothing supernatural about it. No ‘tunnel of light.’ No feeling of rising out of my body. In fact, I have rarely felt so strongly connected to my body. My body was dying and it was taking me with it. It was an intensely physical sensation.”
He goes on to reflect on a snarky comment he used to make. Rushdie used to joke about a “mortal soul” that ended when we did. After his attack, he seems to think that’s a more accurate description of that non-material “thing” that inhabits each of us.
That implicit challenge to orthodoxy about an “immortal soul” is also a launching pad for broader lessons he hopes to impart at the end of Knife.
What Art is For
Matar was radicalized after a trip to Lebanon, where he fell in with Hezbollah militants and imbibed their ideology. Hezbollah endorsed the old fatwa against Rushdie that sent him into hiding for a decade. Matar seemed to find meaning in carrying out an assassination long since abandoned by Iran’s theocratic regime.
Rushdie spends a chapter imagining how he would speak to Matar, referring to him only as “the A.” He concludes the imagined exchange with one last thing Rushdie hoped to tell his attacker:
“The most important of these things is that art challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the recieved ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art, as Flaubert told us in Bouvard and Pecuchet. Cliches are recieved ideas and so are ideologies, both those which depend on the sanction of invisible sky gods and those which do not. Without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.”
Rushdie has little patience for readers without a sense of humor. His novels are funny, and his playfulness with language is a signature feature of his writing style. Rushdie argues that his assassin tried to kill him “because [he] didn’t know how to laugh.” Recognizing the absurdities of even popular ideas is one of the most important ways to reexamine them.
Art is a great way to conduct these reexaminations. Rushdie is not only arguing that it’s effective, but also that it’s necessary to allow art that forces these questions, even and especially if those questions are offensive to some.
Opposing the Assassin’s Veto
Professional writers reach that level in part because they reject cliches. These writers eliminate phrases that everyone uses, like “oppressive heat” or “rummaging through her handbag,” two phrases that Martin Amis had on hand to discourage.
Cliches aren’t limited to words and phrases. Rushdie has already pointed out that they’re borrowed ideas, and people who plug ideas into their minds where original thoughts should go reveal themselves in their unreasoned approaches to the world. Trying to kill an author because of someone else’s worldview is the height of unreason.
For all our access to information, our ability to form our own conclusions hasn’t scaled as quickly. Rushdie wrote:
“…there’s nothing modern about a knife, and yet he, the A., is wholly product of the new technologies of our information age, for which ‘disinformation age’ might be a more accurate name. The groupthink-manufacturing giants, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and violent video games were his teachers. Added to what appeared to be a malleable personality which found in the groupthink of radical Islam a structure for the identity it needed, they produced a self that almost became a murderer.”
Online platforms have made it easier for niche beliefs to find communities. In liberal societies where the search for meaning is never complete, it’s never been easier or more tempting to adopt a worldview that has already been built out online.
In Rushdie’s telling, Matar was an empty man who let a hateful and ignorant group pour their ideology into him. Matar may have found meaning, but it cost him a more fulfilled life he could have lived, and it almost cost Rushdie his life.
Knife confronts questions that range from morbid curiosity to existential and does so in just over 200 pages. It’s a worthy addition to anyone’s bookshelf.