Salman Rushdie on stabbing incident: 'Attacker came like a squat missile'

Salman Rushdie on stabbing incident: ‘Attacker came like a squat missile’

Author Salman Rushdie, recalling the stabbing incident at a literary festival in 2022, said the attacker came in “hard and low” like a “squat missile”. In an interview with CBS News ahead of the launch of his book “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, Rushdie said his first thought on seeing his attacker was, “So it’s you”.

“I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, ‘So it’s you. Here you are’,” the British-Indian novelist said in his first television interview since the attack.

The Booker Prize winner was attacked on stage when he was about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. The attacker was identified as a 24-year-old man named Hadi Matar, who apparently sympathised with Shia extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Rushdie, who was stabbed multiple times, lost vision in one eye and feeling in some fingers.

In the interview, Rushdie said “the last thing my right eye would ever see” was a man in black clothes “coming in hard and low” like a “squat missile”.

The Mumbai-born author, known for his novel “Midnight’s Children”, was told by doctors that he was lucky to escape with his life as the man who stabbed him “had no idea how to kill with a knife”.

Rushdie said that one of the surgeons told him, “‘First you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky.'”

“I said, ‘What’s the lucky part?’ 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’,” the author said.

Rushdie has received several death threats ever since his novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’, was published in 1988. The book has been banned in Iran and many Muslim nations, which called it blasphemous.

In 1989, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, calling for Rushdie’s death. A bounty of over $3 million was also offered for killing Rushdie.