Salman Rushdie has revealed he thought Iran’s fatal fatwa was being carried out when he was attacked with a knife at a New York book fair.
The 76-year-old author thought he would die during the assassination attempt on the stage of the literary festival on August 12, 2022.
Mr Rushdie lost the sight in his right eye during the brutal 27-second attack, which also saw him suffer stab wounds to the face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand.
The publication of his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, was heavily criticized for its suggested contradiction of the infallibility of the Prophet Muhammad and was banned in a number of countries.
In 1989, Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared a $3 million fatwa on his life because of the “blasphemy” contained in the book, sending the author into hiding for ten years.
Now Mr Rushdie explained that his ‘first thought’ when he saw the would-be killer coming towards him was: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’.
Salman Rushdie described how his attacker slit his throat in the assassination attempt that cost him an eye and nearly killed him in August 2022.
It took festival goers and festival staff 27 seconds to drag Rushdie’s attacker off him
The author spent eight hours in surgery, 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehabilitation after being transported to the hospital from the Chautauqua Amphitheater in New York.
Pakistani activists from Jamiat Tulba Arabia, a student wing of the Jamaat-i-Islami party, shout slogans in front of a burning effigy of Salman Rushdie in Multan on June 17, 2007
He also said the attack still upsets me “every day” as he prepares to publish it in “Knife,” his 22nd book, Tuesday.
He said: “I must confess that I have sometimes imagined my killer emerging in some public forum and coming after me in exactly this way,” he wrote.
‘So my first thought when I saw this murderous figure running towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’
Before the 2022 knife attack, Mr Rushdie’s police officers warned him of half a dozen serious murder attempts by state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off his attempts in 1998.
But the fatwa remains in effect and a lone wolf almost claimed the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.
He almost retreated after having a dream two nights earlier in which he was violently attacked.
Perhaps unconsciously stimulated by the name of the location, he dreamed that he was in a Roman gladiator arena.
“It was just someone with a spear sticking down, and I was rolling on the ground trying to get away from him,” he told CBS.
The dream was so vivid that it left him thrashing around in his bed as he tried to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who in turn had to wake him and reassure him.
“I was quite shocked by it,” he told the BBC, “and I said to Eliza, I don’t want to go.
“And then you kind of wake up and think, it’s just a dream, and you’re not going to let something that happened in a dream control your life. And so I thought: I’m going. It’s a performance.’
He pushed his fears aside, only to find there was no safety when he took the stage to give a talk about the importance of protecting writers whose lives are threatened.
“Out of the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running along the right side of the seating area toward me,” he writes in his book.
But he didn’t see the knife and at first thought he had just been punched.
“I think he was just swinging around wildly, you know,” Rushdie said.
The Indian-born author was hit with a $3 million fatwa and suffered at least six state-sponsored assassination attempts after publishing The Satanic Verses in 1988.
The book sparked worldwide protests among Muslims outraged by the alleged ‘blasphemy’.
But then he saw a pool of blood “flowing from my body,” and realized that his right eye was “hanging a little from my face, sitting on my cheek, as I have said, like a soft-boiled egg.” And blind’.
‘I remember thinking I was probably going to die. And it was interesting because it was quite factual. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like I was terrified of it or anything.”
Rushdie’s account of the attack will be published by Penguin Random House
It took 27 seconds for festival staff to manage to pull the attacker off the then 75-year-old.
Mr Rushdie said: ‘That’s quite a long time. That is the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, in which life meets death.’
The author was airlifted to hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery for eight hours before being put on a ventilator and unable to speak.
He said he felt a ‘deep sense of loneliness’ at the prospect of dying away from his family, but recovered because “a part of me, a struggling part deep inside, simply had no intention of dying.”
After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged.
One of his surgeons told him that he was both very unlucky and very lucky.
“I said, ‘What’s the happy part?’ And he said, “The lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” Rushdie said.
His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, was dragged from the stage by stewards and held without bail in the Chautauqua County Jail pending trial.
Born in California to Lebanese parents, he was found at his arrest with a fake driver’s license in the names of two Hezbollah commanders, admitting that he had read only two pages of the book that had so outraged Iranian clerics.
Mr Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he eventually goes to trial, but he has refused to name him in his new book.
“He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That’s it,” Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.
“I don’t need to waste any more time with him.”
The author has always fought against being defined by the attempts on his life and hesitated to turn his pen to the attack that almost killed him, until he decided it might help him come to terms with it.
“I have to focus on, you know, using the cliché, the elephant in the room,” he said.
‘And the moment I thought that, something changed in my mind. And then it became a book that I really wanted to write.
‘I mean, language is a way to open up the world. I have no other weapons.’
His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, admitted he had read only two pages of the book that had so outraged Iranian clerics.
Hadi Matar, 25, returned from four weeks in Lebanon as a religious fanatic, his mother told Dailymail.com
Author Salman Rushdie has described his 256-page memoir as “a way of taking charge of what happened and responding to violence with art” after the attack in August 2022.
And he said he realized his slowly growing confidence in the ability to live a normal life had been a mistake.
“That sense of time warp, you know, of being drawn into a story that I thought was over, but it turned out not to be.
“I think that shadow is just there, and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not.
“I hope this is just the last part of that story. Don’t know. I’ll let you know.’