Award-winning novelist Sir Salman Rushdie opened up for the first time about the attack that nearly ended his life in 2022, calling his survival a “miracle.”
“How does somebody who doesn’t believe in the supernatural account for the fact that something has happened, which feels like a miracle?” Rushdie told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper during a segment that aired Sunday.
“I mean, I certainly don’t feel that some hand reached down from the sky and guarded me, but I do think something happened which wasn’t supposed to happen,” Rushdie clarified. “I have no explanation for it.”
Rushdie, 76, was stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution before he was slated to give a lecture. Emergency responders airlifted him to a hospital in northwestern Pennsylvania, and he underwent surgery.
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He suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, ultimately losing function of the injured eye. The attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, had his trial delayed until after the publication of Rushdie’s new memoir, “Knife,” which comes out this week and details his experience.
“One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, ‘first, you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky … the lucky part was that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,’” Rushdie explained, appearing in the interview with glasses blacked out over the damaged eye.
Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” prompted worldwide protests following its publication in 1988. The book’s publication led to the murder of its Japanese translator and “others associated with it were attacked,” according to “60 Minutes.”
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The outrage ultimately prompted Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei to issue a fatwa, or religious decree, that called for Rushdie’s death. The fatwa drove Rushdie to flee to the United Kingdom, where he lived for years before diplomatic negotiations led the Iranian state to declare the affair “completely finished” and insist that the country would not encourage anyone else to threaten Rushdie’s life.
However, Iranian clerics and religious groups continued to urge followers to kill Rushdie, periodically raising the bounty on his head, which amounts to just shy of $4 million, according to Reuters.
Kiran Desai, left, and Salman Rushdie speak onstage at The Center for Fiction 2023 Annual Awards Benefit at Cipriani 25 Broadway on Dec. 5, 2023 in New York City. (Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images for The Center for Fiction)
Despite admitting that he had read little of “The Satanic Verses,” Matar stabbed Rushdie because the author had “attacked Islam” and, on top of that, he did not like Rushdie very much. He pleaded not guilty to the charges of attempted murder.
Rushdie struggled to confront the attack, which lasted 27 seconds – “quite a long time” in which he felt “intimacy in which life meets death.”
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“I saw the man in black running towards me, down the right-hand side of the seating area: Black clothes, black face mask – he was coming in hard and low, a squat missile,” Rushdie recalled. “I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in this way.”
“My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So, it’s you. Here you are,” he continued, adding, “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time … back into that distant past in order to kill me.”
Hadi Matar, the man accused in the attempted murder of British author Salman Rushdie, appears in court for a procedural hearing at Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, New York, on Aug. 18, 2022. (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)
Only the intervention of audience members around him – people who remain total strangers to him even today – stopped the attack and gave him a fighting chance. He initially didn’t want to write the book, but ultimately found that “it became clear to me that I couldn’t write anything else.”
“Language is a way of breaking open the world,” Rushdie opined. “I don’t have any other weapons, but I’ve been using this particular tool for quite a long time, and so I thought this was my way of dealing with it.”
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“I don’t feel I’m very different, but I do feel that it has left a shadow,” Rushdie added. “I think that shadow is just there, and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not … I just feel more the presence of death.”
