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Today my pre-order of Salman Rushdie's memoir Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder arrived. I plan to write a book review of it soon.
Knife chronicles the 2022 assassination attempt on Rushdie at a New York literary conference and his recovery. It's a story of survival, radicalism, love and the might and resonance of art defeating hate and violence.
I was a senior in high school when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989 sent the worst valentine ever when he declared a fatwa against Rushdie. The reason for his publicly declared execution was his fourth novel The Satanic Verses.
Because of its perceived blasphemy against the prophet Muhammed and Islam, Khomeini extended the fatwa to anyone associated with The Satanic Verses. Two years later, the novel's Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was assassinated. Like Igarashi, the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was also stabbed. Fortunately, he survived his assisination attempt.
This past Sunday, 60 Minutes aired Anderson Cooper's too brief interview and story about Rushdie and Knife. No surprise that Rushdie wisely chose not to name his failed assassination in Knife or mention his name to Cooper. Keeping the assassin unnamed gives Rushdie the ultimate power in making the assassin mere dust in literary and world history.
When Cooper mentioned the assassination lived in his mother's basement, I snarked, “Of course.” But that quip just diminishes how isolation leads to radicalism where a vulnerable person fills their time with watching videos and other content to fill their hollowness — a hollowness carved by loneliness, low self-esteem, fear, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and a misunderstanding of one’s chosen faith.
Rushdie’s 1989 fatwa happened when I was an immature juvenile writer. I knew I wanted to be writer but until this event, I never knew a writer’s work of imagination could get them killed. Decades later I understand an artist’s and a writer’s existence becoming endangered is a fact of life.
At the end of Rushdie's 60 Minutes segment, I again reflected if I could be brave, steady and good humored as Rushdie if someone called for my death over something I wrote. During the interview, Cooper mentioned that the UK government provided Rushdie a decade of protection before the “Iranian state called off its assassins in 1998.” Since then Rushdie has lived publicly and moved to the U S. where he has lived peacefully — until 2022.
Like other writers I read who have found themselves threatened and imprisoned because of their words, politics and identities, Rushdie is a person and writer I aspire to be.
Art, literature and language are important not only for people developing their empathy, humanity and intelligence but because art, literature and language’s peaceful expressions cut deeper than any knife.
Wow. I can’t believe there were even assassinations and attempts on translators. I remember his attack not too long ago. He’s a brilliant writer. I might check out the Satanic Verses. I’ll be honest and say I could never get through Midnight’s Children. It was the density.