Attack processed
“Books are important, not knives”
In "Knife. Thoughts after an Attempted Murder", Salman Rushdie has an imaginary conversation with the assassin who took his eye and almost his life in 2022. The book will be published worldwide on April 16.
"I had the feeling I was going to die. Fortunately, I was wrong," recalls Salman Rushdie in an interview with the BBC on the darkest day of his life. This 12. August 2022, when he was attacked on stage with a knife and seriously injured. More than 30 years after the Iranian regime had declared him outlawed in a fatwa, a Islamic legal opinion, because of his novel "The Satanic Verses" , this disaster caught up with him.
The then 24-year-old Hadi Matar "stormed up the stairs", as Rushdie recounts - and immediately stabbed him, twelve times in total. "I couldn't have fought him, I couldn't have escaped." There was this "spectacular amount of blood" everywhere and his eye felt "like a soft-boiled egg", says Rushdie. He sees this loss as a daily burden.
In his acceptance speech for the 2023 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, he emphasized: "It's the books that are important, not the knives." And now he holds this much more powerful sword of words against his attacker. "It was necessary for me to write this book: It's my way of coming to grips with what happened and responding to violence with art," explains Rushdie.
In "Knife. Thoughts after an Attempted Murder", which is published worldwide today, he has an imaginary conversation with the assassin. And yet this story of horror has also become a "story of love". "Two forces have collided here. The power of violence and fanaticism - and the power of love. The second is embodied by my wife Eliza, of course," he reveals. "And in the end, the power of love turned out to be stronger for me than the power of hate."
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