In the year 2000, Salman Rushdie had had enough of living under constant surveillance. The writer of The Satanic Verses, the book that prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to pronounce the death sentence, the fatwa, on Rushdie in 1989, moved from London to New York. Rushdie very consciously entered public life there as a literary phenomenon, but also as chairman of the writers’ organization PEN America. This is to underline that intimidation and religious fanaticism should never win over the freedom of the artist.
And so it was that on August 12, 2022, Rushdie would speak at the amphitheater of Chautauqua, in upstate New York, about his involvement in creating safe places in America for writers who were insecure about their lives elsewhere in the world .
In the audience was a 24-year-old man of Lebanese-American descent. Raised by a perfectly integrated mother in New Jersey, this Hadi Matar had visited his father in Lebanon five years earlier. He lived near the border with Israel in a village that was completely dominated by Hezbollah.
Imam Yutubi
Returning to his mother completely brainwashed, Matar locked himself in the basement. There he was spiritually matured through social media, in Rushdie’s words, ‘by the many-headed and many-voiced Imam Yutubi’ to get rid of the devilish author. He considered it unnecessary to take note of Rushdie’s work.
Before Salman Rushdie could speak, the Muslim terrorist stormed the stage and stabbed the defenseless writer 15 times. Only after 27 seconds was Matar overpowered by members of the audience.
Rushdie’s account of the almost successful assassination attempt, the medics’ struggle for his life and the meticulous assessment of the physical and mental damage inflicted on him is moving. He knows Knife to find exactly the right tone to express the bewilderment, the desperation, but also the love of his wife, sister and sons and the indignation of his colleagues. The translation by Karina van Santen and Martine Vosmaer is excellent.
But Rushdie offers more than an evocation of a personal drama. After all, the attempted murder is also and above all an act of religiously inspired political violence. Exactly a week after the attack, hundreds of supporters gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library to show their solidarity.
Religious totalitarianism
Rushdie sees it in his hospital bed on his wife Elisa Griffith’s laptop: ‘Now my friend the great writer Colum McCann said about me ‘Je suis Salman’, just like me and countless others on January 7, 2015, after the murder of the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo, ‘Je suis Charlie‘ had said. How moving, but also strange, it was to become the slogan.’
The comparison also strikes Rushdie in an analytical sense. He recalls what he said immediately after Charlie Hebdo –murders wrote: ‘When religion, an ancient form of unreason, is combined with modern weaponry, it becomes a real threat to our freedom. Religious totalitarianism has led to a deadly mutation at the heart of Islam.’
Groupthink
In the case of his attacker, Rushdie wants to replace the word ‘weaponry’ with ‘technology’, because there is nothing modern about a knife. Yet Matar (Rushdie does not mention his name Knife) entirely the product of the technology of our ‘disinformation age’.
Rushdie: ‘The giants of the groupthink industry, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, and violent video games were his teachers. Combined with an apparently easily malleable personality that found a structure for the identity he needed in the groupthink of radical Islam, they produced a self that almost became a murderer.’
The wave of sympathy that came to Rushdie after the Chautauqua attack not only comforted him, but also surprised him. Because that was different after the fatwa. At that time, compassion was often hard to find. Rushdie recalls the hurtful criticism he faced in 1989 by writers such as Germaine Greer and politicians such as Jimmy Carter:
‘He brought it on himself, he got himself into trouble with ‘his own people’, and now we have to get him out of trouble, he criticized Mrs Thatcher, but now her government is paying the cost of taking his life and he’s fine with that, and is there really someone who wants to kill him or is he just enjoying the attention?’
Again heavily secured
Rushdie adds parenthetically: ‘(For the record, as far as I know, at least six assassination attempts were planned against me in the years following the fatwa, all thwarted by the expertise of British intelligence.)
After the seventh attack, Salman Rushdie again has to live under heavy security.
Salman Rushdie: Knife. Thoughts after attempted murderPluim, 216 pages, € 21.99
Hans Wansink is a historian and journalist and publishes about books in Wynia’s Week. He was editor of NRC Handelsblad, Intermediair and de Volkskrant.
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Tags: groupthink radical Islam molded weak personality nearmurderer
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