Salman Rushdie: The 2024 60 Minutes Interview

Salomon rushi has been a Marked Man for almost half his life in 1989. Iran's Ayatollah leader declared his novel The Satanic Verses blasphemous as an insult to Islam and called for the Indian writer's murder. Rushi went into hiding with 24-hour police protection for 10 days. years, he finally moved to the US and thought he was safe, but in August 2022, when he was about to speak at a literary festival and CH talk with New York, Salman Rushy was attacked by a Muslim with a knife, Rushy, now 76, lost the right. eye and was about to die he has accepted the attempt on his life by writing a book about it called simply knife which comes out on Tuesday this is his first television

interview

since the attack the story will continue at a time when you had a dream M two days I think it was before the attack, what was the dream?

I had some kind of premonition, I mean, I had a dream of being attacked in an amphitheater, but it was some kind of Roman Empire dream, you know, it's like I was in the Colosseum and it was just someone with the spear stabbing down and I I was rolling on the floor trying to get away from him and I woke up and I was pretty shaken up by it and I had to go to Cha, you know, and I. I told my wife Eliza I said you know I don't want to go for the dream for the dream and then I thought don't be silly it's a dream I felt that Salon Rashi one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation had been invited to the city of Chiaka nearby from Lake Erie to speak on a topic that you know very well the importance of protecting writers whose lives are threatened did you have any anxiety being in such a public space not really because in the over 20 years that I've been Living in America, I have done many of these things.

You haven't had security around you for a long time, but you know what happens in a lot of places you go in class. It's that they are used to having a certain degree of security. Security in this case there was no irony, of course, you were there to talk about writers in danger, yes, exactly, and the need for writers from other countries to have safe spaces in the United States, among other places, and then, yes , turned out not to be a safe space for me for years, no place was safe for Salon Rushy, whose sprawling 600-page novel, The Satanic Verses, offended some Muslims for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Iran.

The ayatollahs issued a fatwa, a religious decree calling for Rush's death in 1989. There were protests around the world from London over the tradition. The satanic verses were burned and 12 people died in clashes with the police. The Japanese translator of the books was murdered and others associated with him were attacked. Any idea that it would cause violence. No, I had no idea. I thought some conservative religious people probably wouldn't like it, but they didn't like anything I wrote anyway, so I thought, "Well, if you were naive, they probably wouldn't have to read it." You know, I mean, it's easy to look back and think, but nothing like this had ever happened to anyone, and of course, almost all of the people who attacked the book did so without reading it.

I was often told that I intended to insult people and my point of view. was that if I need to insult you I can do it very quickly. I don't need to spend 5 years of my life trying to write a 600 page book to insult you. Rushi was living in London when he went into hiding and for the next 10 years, the British government provided him with 24-hour police protection. Did someone try to kill you? Yes, there were perhaps as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts. They weren't random people. They were state-sponsored terrorism professionals after diplomatic negotiations.

The Iranian State canceled. His assassins in 1998 Rushy finally emerged from the Shadows. He moved to New York and for the next two decades he lived openly. He was a city man. He continued writing. He became a celebrated defender of freedom of expression. So when he received the invitation to speak in Chitaka in August 2012 he 22 gladly accepted. They convulsed me on stage with his new razor. He described what happened next and then, in the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would see. I saw the man in black running towards me. From the right side of the seating area, black clothing, black mask, came hard and low, a squatting missile.

I confess that I had sometimes imagined my killer getting up in some public forum or another and coming at me like this. My first thought when I saw this murderous form running towards me was so it's you here, you're here, so it's you here, you're, yeah, it's like you've been waiting for it, yeah, that's what I felt, like something came out of the distance. past and trying to drag me back in time, if you will, back to that distant rapid to kill me and when it got to me, it basically hit me really hard here and initially I thought you hit me, but you actually didn't. see a knife I didn't see the knife and I didn't realize until I saw blood coming out that there was a knife in his fist so where was that stab wound?

Yes, on your neck, on my neck, yes, then there was a lot more, the worst injuries were that there was a big cut like this on my neck and there is a puncture wound here and then of course there was an attack on my eye, Do you remember how they stabbed me in the eye? No, I remember falling and then I remembered not knowing what had happened to my eye. I think he was also stabbed in the hand, chest, abdomen and thigh. 15 wounds in total. They were both stabbing and cutting. I think it was wild. The attack lasted 27 seconds to feel how long it is.

This is what 27 seconds is, that's all, that's quite a long time, that's the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy in which life meets death. What stopped it from being longer? I don't know their names, some of those strangers restrained the attacker while others desperately tried to stop Rush's blood flow, there really was a lot of blood, you were actually watching your blood, I was actually watching it spread and then I remember thinking that he was probably dying and it was interesting because it was quite natural, it wasn't like he was terrified of it or whatever and yeah, there was nothing, no heavenly choirs, no pearly gates.

I mean, I'm not a supernatural person, you know, I believe that. death comes as the end nothing happened to change my mind about you haven't had a revelation I haven't had any revelation except that there is no revelation that her attacker the man in black was pushed off the stage in in the book you don't use the attacker's name, yes, I thought you knew that I don't want his name in my book and I don't use it in conversations either, but that's important for you, not to give him space in your brain, yes, him. and I had 27 seconds together, you know, that's it, I don't need to give him any more of my time.

Paramedics were quickly flown to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, 40 miles away, where a team of doctors fought for 8 hours to save his life. finally came out of surgery his wife Eliza, a poet and novelist, was waiting for them he didn't move and just lay there he looked half dead to you yes he did he was a different color he was cold I mean his face was stapled alone Staples holding his face in a bit of a hurry was on a ventilator unable to speak Eliza and the doctors had no idea if the knife that had penetrated his eye had damaged his brain someone on the staff said we would use this toe movement system to communicate to communicate Do you remember the first question you asked to get her to move or I think I said Salon, it's Eliza, can you hear me and there was a movement and I asked her?

I think you can know where you are. and it moved um and it was a very basic and simple question, you can't express yourself with any subtlety with your toes, which is what you like the most after 18 days in the hospital and 3 weeks in rehab. Rushy was discharged, one of the surgeons who had saved his life. First he told me that you had a lot of bad luck and then you had a lot of luck. I told him what the lucky part is and he said, well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.

You are not a believer in Miracles, but the fact that you survived, as you write in the book, is a miracle. This is a contradiction. How does someone who doesn't believe in the Supernatural explain the fact that something that feels like a miracle happened? I certainly don't feel like a hand came down from heaven and protected me, but I do believe that something happened that wasn't supposed to happen and I have no explanation for it. His attacker was a 24-year-old man from New Jersey who lived in his mother's basement. He is believed to be a lone wolf.

He has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and is awaiting trial. In an

interview

, he told the New York Post that he had only read a couple of pages of the Satanic Verses and had seen some clips of Rushi on YouTube, and he said he didn't like him very much because Rushi had attacked Islam, do you care what his reason? I mean, it's interesting to me because it's a mystery if he would have written a character who knew so little about what he proposed. victim and yet he was willing to commit the crime of murder. My editors might as well tell me that's undermotivated, you need to develop that character, there's no good enough reason for you to know he's unconvincing, but that's what he did.

Knife Rush, his 22nd book is one. he initially didn't want to write that was the last thing he wanted to do because you didn't want this to define you again yeah it was very hard for me after the satanic versus was published that the only thing anyone knew about me was this death threat but It became clear to me that I couldn't write anything else. You had to write this first. I had to write this first. I just thought, you know, I need to focus on, you know, using the cliché, the elephant in it. room and the moment I thought that, something changed in my head and then it turned into a book that I really wanted to write.

You say that language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back, own what happened to me, own it, make it my own, yeah, I mean, language is a way to open the world, um, I don't have any other weapons, but I've been using this one. particular tool for quite a while, you know, so I thought this was my way of dealing with it. It's been almost 2 years since the attack and Rushy is back home now in New York, slowly getting used to navigating the world with one eye.

How much? How long did it take me to readjust? I'm still doing it you still are yeah do you feel like you're a different person after the attack? I don't feel very different, but I do feel like it has left a shadow. I think that shadow is just there, you know, and some days it's dark and other days it's not, you feel less than before no, I just feel the presence of death more in an interview almost 25 years ago you said about fwa I want to find closure for this story is the only story I must find an ending so that you have found that ending and an ending for this story also I thought I had and then it turned out I hadn't.

I hope this is just one last tick of that story um I don't know I'll let you know too Solman Rushy on censorship in America there's a left and right movement today on 60 Minutes overtime.com sponsored by ntech ODT