“Why didn't I fight?” Salman Rushdie tells the story of the 2022 stabbing horror

New York:

British-American writer Salman Rushdie recounts the near-fatal stabbing at a public event in 2022 that left him blind in one eye, and his journey to recovery in his new memoir, “The Knife,” which hits stores Tuesday.

The Indian-born author, a naturalized American based in New York, has faced death threats since Iran's supreme leader deemed his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous, making Rushdie a global icon of free expression.

But after years of remaining unharmed, a knife-wielding attacker jumped on stage at an arts gathering in rural New York State and stabbed Rushdie several times in the neck and stomach. In the end, he lost his right eye.

“Why didn't I fight? Why didn't I run? I just stood there like a pinata and let him crush me,” Rushdie wrote, according to excerpts from the book published by The Guardian.

“It wasn't dramatic, or particularly horrific. It seemed likely… matter-of-fact.”

Tehran denied any connection to the attacker, but said Rushdie, now 76 years old, was solely responsible for the incident. The suspect, who was 24 years old, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder.

In an interview with the New York Post, the alleged attacker, whose parents immigrated from Lebanon to the United States, said he had only read two pages of “The Satanic Verses” but believed Rushdie “attacked Islam.”

“it is a dream”

“Since that horrific day… we have been waiting for the story of how Salman’s would-be killers finally caught him,” said Susan Nossel, CEO of the free speech advocacy group PEN America.

She said: “Salman, a master storyteller, has kept this narrative close until now, leaving us marveling from a distance at his courage and resilience.”

In an interview with CBS's “60 Minutes” before the screening of “The Knife,” Rushdie recounted that two days before the attack he dreamed that he was stabbed in an amphitheater, and considered not attending the event.

“Then I thought: 'Don't be silly. It's a dream,'” he said.

He also wrote in the book that he was to be paid a “generous” fee for the event, money which he intended to use for repairs to his house.

Rushdie was invited to speak about protecting writers whose lives were threatened, an irony that did not escape his mind.

“It turned out to be not a safe space for me,” he told his interviewer.

Rushdie says in the book that he suffered nightmares following the attack, according to The Guardian.

'lightness'

Rushdie was born in Mumbai and moved to England as a boy, and gained attention for his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for its depiction of post-independence India.

But The Satanic Verses brought him much greater, and often unwelcome, attention.

The atheist author, whose parents were non-practicing Muslims, was forced to go underground.

He received police protection in Britain after his translators and publishers were killed or attempted to be killed, and he moved repeatedly while in hiding.

Rushdie did not begin to flee from his life until the late 1990s, after Iran said it would not support his assassination.

He became a fixture on the international concert circuit, even appearing in films such as “Bridget Jones's Diary” and the American television comedy series “Seinfeld.”

The author has been married five times and has two children.

Since the attack, he has also published the novel “Victory City” (2023).

He again visited the Chautauqua Institution, where the near-fatal event occurred, and wrote in the book that the trip was cathartic.

“As we stood there in the stillness,” Rushdie wrote, “I realized that a burden had somehow been lifted from me, and the best word I could find to describe what I was feeling was lightness.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)