Salman Rushdie on Jihadism, Fascism and the Fight for Free Expression: ‘Everybody’s Gone Crazy’

The remarkable life of novelist Salman Rushdie hit a new peak at the Sundance Film Festival as “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” a documentary about the stabbing attack that nearly killed him in 2022, debuted during a weekend of just as shocking U.S. political violence. 

The unrest in Minnesota was impossible to avoid this weekend and it threw the historic events of Rushdie’s life into sharp relief, from his continuing to write in the face of a 1989 religious death edict to his insistence on chronicling the gruesome violence of the 2022 attack to bear witness to the current risks to artistic freedom. 

We spoke on the day that ICE agents had shot a man dead in Minnesota who had been trying to protect a female protester, the second such shooting death in two weeks. The conversation necessarily turned to Trump’s assault on free expression.

“For the authoritarian mind, culture is the enemy,” Rushdie told me. “Culture in its broadest sense: universities, journalism, artists, poets, musicians. Culture itself is the enemy because culture encourages freedom. It encourages discussing things and disagreeing and arguing about things and doing new things, discarding old things. Culture encourages freedom.”

Now he watches the renewed rise of jihadism, the extreme views of the progressive left and the brutality of the Trump administration with something like bewilderment and alarm.

“Everybody’s gone crazy right now,” he stated baldly. “It’s very hard to have a serious conversation.”

At this point we were talking about the “horseshoe” theory, how the extremes of the right and the left loop around in their radicalism and end in agreement. As an intellectual whose ideas made him public enemy no. 1 to many Muslims for decades, the newfound alliance between jihadist ideology and anti-colonial, progressive ideas is disturbing, but not new.

“I remember back in the day when the attack on me was beginning, reading a piece in The Nation, a hardcore left-wing paper, in which the argument was made that the left should be on the side of the Ayatollah because he was the only force in the world that was fighting against American hegemony,” he said. “I was very shocked by that at the time. I’m less shocked by its recurrences, because I see how it comes about.”

I mention that this is why the left has not strongly come out to support the popular Iranian uprising, or has trouble condemning Hamas.  

“There is this problem that Hamas exists,” he said. “It is a terrorist organization that needs to be spoken of, as well as the atrocities committed by the Netanyahu government, and maybe it isn’t spoken of enough.”

Let’s back up. In 2022 Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly – in his cheek, chest, eye, neck and thigh – as he began a public lecture in Chappaqua, New York. The attacker was 24-year-old Hadi Matar, an American with no previous criminal record who had become radicalized in the Middle East and was convinced that Rushdie should die.

The savage attack took Rushdie’s right eye and required multiple surgeries, stitches and rehab to crawl his way back a semblance of health.

But it had been years, decades actually, since the writer lived under the shadow of violence due to the fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran’s then-leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni. The imam demanded Rushdie’s death for the book “Satanic Verses,” which Khomeini deemed blasphemous to Islam and worthy of a death sentence. Rushdie lived in hiding for a decade. 

Through the years, the writer neither apologized nor retracted his work, and went on to write 23 more novels. He eventually moved to the United States where he lived a rather normal life, or so he thought.

The attack in 2022 was a great shock, he said. And almost immediately, he and his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths agreed that they needed to tell the story of its violence. The result was Rushdie’s book, “Knife,” and now the film by renowned documentarian Alex Gibney. 

The film leans in hard to the gory details of what the attacker wrought, the eye bulging out of its socket, the raw, bloody remnants of skin stitched together by surgeons along his chin and neck, and on his torso. Griffiths took most of that footage herself.

“The reason for doing it is that I felt it wasn’t just about me, that there were principles at stake, and that actually maybe people should see what a terrorist attack looks like up close,” Rushdie said.

That, like his decision to go on writing all these years, took focus and courage.

“I told myself to go on being the writer I’d always been,” he said, of his refusal to stop. “Not to write frightened books, and not to write revenge books. Just go on writing the books I had begun to write. To go on down the road I was on, and that was very much an act of will. I really thought, ‘I’m not going to be diverted in either direction, either the direction of cowardice or anger.’”

The price Rushdie has paid is immense. And the threat of violence from an intolerant strain of Islam has grown and now become a presence within the West. His life story is a cautionary tale, as is his unflinching look at not just his injuries, but at why anyone – from Donald Trump to Ayatollah Khomeini – would choose to do violence to a writer.

“I’ve always thought that it’s weird that dictators and tyrants are so frightened by writers and poets,” he reflected. “Why was (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco frightened of (Federico Garcia) Lorca? Why was Caesar Augustus frightened of Ovid? We’ve got no guns. We have no armies. But what we do is we argue with their ability to control the narrative. That’s what dictators want to do. They want to control the narrative. And writers and artists and journalists contest that, and that makes them dangerous.”

“Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” is for sale.

Catch up on all of our Sundance coverage here.

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