Firing Line

- Writing his own sentence, this week on "Firing Line."

(energetic music) - [Reporter 1] Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed by a man who stormed the stage just as-- - [Reporter 2] In 2022, author Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked by a man with a knife.

He survived, but lost his right eye and suffered damage to his left hand.

Two years later, Rushdie published "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder," which has now been turned into a documentary film.

Rushdie has lived under the threat of death since the publication of his fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses," which many Muslims saw as insulting the prophet Muhammad.

- The devil, the true devil himself come to life.

- [Interviewer] How many people do you think feel like that?

- We all feel like that.

All of us.

- [Announcer] In 1989, Iran Supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa instructing faithful Muslims to kill Rushdie.

The fatwa has never been rescinded.

What does Salman Rushdie say now?

- [Narrator] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Grenieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

- Salman Rushdie, welcome to "Firing Line."

- Thank you.

- You've returned to fiction.

- [Salman] Mm-hmm.

- In your most recent book, "The Eleventh Hour," which has just been released in paperback.

You have written three novellas, two short stories.

In one, the protagonist is a professor who awakens one day to find that he is dead.

- So it became my first ever ghost story.

- My understanding of your method of writing is that characters emerge on the page and you follow their stories.

You don't plan anything out, you don't plot it.

You think you have a sense of it and then it develops for you as you engage with the writing.

- Yeah, it's not completely.

I mean, I do have some kind of a sense of what I think I'm doing, but I do think of writing as a kind of process of discovery that you find out what you're writing by writing it.

- The Guardian described the book as death haunted.

The New York Times assessed, "Mortality is on Salman Rushdie's mind," but several of the other stories are much like your past work.

They're about writing and language and love.

And I wonder if you see yourself as the same writer as you did before your attack in 2022.

- Yeah, no, I do.

I mean, in a way, these stories were my way of saying that I'm-- - You're back.

- I'm back.

Yeah.

- Would you have had a ghost story had you not had that brush with death?

- I have no way of knowing, but I mean... - But to what extent is your subconscious still working it through?

- I think probably that to some degree, yes.

I mean, I think if you have a very close shave, which I did have, then it in some way it marks you.

It stays with you.

You don't entirely ever put it out of your head.

And so yeah, there is some of that, but I didn't want it to be a gloomy book.

I wanted it to be playful.

- That does mark a return to your previous work.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And your body of work.

- Because I think one of the things I've always though about my stuff is that it's funny.

And I think also as a person, I don't like to read things which have no sense of humor, and so I don't like to write them.

- Yeah.

You have been productive since 2022.

You published a memoir entitled "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."

It's of course a first person account of the attack against you.

New York Times acclaimed it as notable book of the year.

It was a National Book Award finalist.

You also put yourself through the process of enduring a documentary film with the same title.

Waking up in the hospital after the Chautauqua attack, your first coherent thought you say was, "We've got to document this."

- Yeah.

It was about the third day after the attack when it seemed probable that I would live.

My wife was there by then and she's a very good photographer and cinematographer.

And I said to her, "Let's make a record of this."

- The images in the film are graphic.

Nothing is sugarcoated.

It is shocking.

- Yeah.

- And you have said about most of your previous writing that you aren't writing to shock people, even though your work has been quite shocking to many people as it turns out.

- Yeah.

(laughing) That is true.

- But that wasn't what you were trying to do.

- No.

- But in this case... - I though people have to see.

You can't varnish it.

There's two shocking things about the documentary.

I think one at each end of the documentary.

I mean, in the early stages of the film, you'll see the extent of the injuries.

There were something like 15 knife wounds and they were all across my neck and of course my eye.

I think that is hard to watch.

- Yeah.

- I think when the film was premiered at Sundance earlier this year, at least one person ran screaming out of the cinema.

- It is very graphic.

- So it starts off, it's kind of a little bit of a horror movie, then it goes on to other subjects, but near the very end of the film, there's another thing that's never been seen before, which is the footage of the actual attack.

Until now, it hasn't been possible to show that material because it was considered to be evidence.

And it's only now that the juries have seen it, that material is no longer embargoed, so we were able to include it.

- One part of the book "Knife" that I just can't get out of my mind is that two nights before the attack, you had a dream that you were attacked in what you said was a place similar to a Roman amphitheater, and the individual was attacking you with a spear.

And this isn't the first time you had had a similar dream.

You write that perhaps it was a premonition and I know you've spent time on your characters exploring telepathy.

Do you ever wonder whether you should have taken or you might have taken that more seriously?

- Yeah, I definitely have wondered that.

(laughing) I mean, it was like a scene from a Ridley Scott movie or from a gladiator movie, the dream that I had.

And I did, I mean, I woke up and I talked to my wife and I said, "I had this dream and maybe I shouldn't go."

- What'd she say?

- She said she was uncertain.

And then I said, "You don't change your day because you had a bad dream.

"If you had a bad dream, you still got to go on "with your program."

- Do you get security?

- Well, I think one of the things that unfortunately was the case at Chautauqua is that they had no security at all.

I mean, I often think there was where I was sitting on the stage to my right, there was a little small flight of steps, like three or four steps from the audience level up to the stage level.

If there'd been one person standing there, nothing would have happened.

So it could very simply have been avoided.

- But you've lived for much time now without security and that's a choice to live in freedom.

- Well, it's also been, you gain confidence when you do it a lot.

Over the course of the last 25 years that I've been living in the United States, and I've done hundreds of public events, there's never been the faintest whiff of trouble.

So this felt like a blast from the past.

It felt like in some way a time warp, something coming out of ancient history.

- I wonder if... Do you think about your present day any differently now given the intensification of hostilities and the US war with Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also their expanded hit list, if you will, of Americans, dissidents, journalists in this time?

- Yeah.

I don't think of it that differently.

I mean, I think both the Americans and the Iranians have got other things to worry about than me.

I mean, I've never stopped having contacts with intelligence.

And at the moment, they don't suggest that there's anything serious going on in this direction.

- May it continue to be so.

In the opening of "The Satanic Verses," the book tells readers to be born again, first you have to die.

We all have phases in our lives, but yours have been extreme.

Do you feel like you've died and been born again over and over again?

- Well, this time I did have something like that feeling.

I think what my editor said to me was very few people have the experience of coming very, very close to death and then returning.

I mean, you could have it with just illness.

It doesn't have to be from an act of violence.

And I said, "Yeah, I guess that's true."

And he said, "Well, tell us about it.

"What's that like and what does it make you feel?"

And what it made me feel was that I'd been given a kind of second act as a kind of gift, something I may well, the odds were against it, but fortunately the odds were wrong.

But what it has made me feel is if you've got a second act, how do you use it?

What do you do with it?

And it's given me a kind of motto, which is don't waste your time.

That focus on doing the things that are most important to me, that's intensified considerably since the attack.

- Did any part of you die in that attack?

- I hope not.

I mean, there was a moment when I feared that I might not be able to write again.

I mean, there was quite a lot.

I mean, there are weeks and months after the attack when writing seemed like some foolishness from another time, but fortunately it came back.

- You remain an atheist.

- Yes.

- Nearly being murdered because of religious decree has not changed how you think about religion.

In life, you address the man who tried to kill you and you write, "I don't forgive you.

"I don't not forgive you.

"You are simply irrelevant to me."

Is indifference the freedom that forgiveness is supposed to provide?

- I think indifference is the best way of dealing with it.

Just for him not to be important is, to me, the best way of dealing with him.

And that takes some doing because there's a kind of natural human thing which is to feel angry, and then you're told that you're supposed to be forgiving.

I don't feel forgiving, but I also don't feel not forgiving.

I just think, okay, go away.

- It made me think of that Nelson Mandela writing, "If I didn't leave my bitterness "and hatred behind, I'd still be in prison."

- Absolutely.

100%.

I think one of the things that those emotions do is they trap you and they trap you in the place you don't want to be.

- Yeah.

- So in a way, you have to let go of all that stuff, all that anger, revenge, all those things, because then that is a way of being free.

My interest now is to lead the life that is mine to lead and is not defined by a man who tried to kill me.

That would give him too much power.

- Next week is the 25th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

- Yes, indeed.

- And the Pentagon.

And you have drawn the connection between those attacks and your attack, writing that, "They're part of the same story, the story "of religious terrorist violence."

If they are on a continuum, where does the story go?

- Well, I hope it runs out of steam.

I think the fact is that there are religious entities, including states, which are very extremist.

Those same entities are actually very deeply disliked by their citizens.

So it is in the nature of dictatorships to rise, but it's also in the nature of dictatorships to fall.

And the only question is how long will it take?

- When the fatwa was issued against you, some literary figures and political leaders, including President Jimmy Carter, suggested that you were somehow at fault to some degree for the threats against you.

And after you were attacked in 2022, you observed that the reaction from the public was quite different.

How do you understand that shift?

- It's the fact I got hurt.

That's the difference.

- So there's sympathy.

- There's sympathy, because just human nature, somebody's almost killed, and you feel sympathy.

- You have said that America is in a very difficult moment for free speech.

- Mm-hmm.

- Especially under the second Trump administration.

And there have been icons of free speech for decades.

You are one.

Elon Musk has become one of late.

What does he get wrong about free speech?

- Well, I don't think he believes in it.

- Why?

- I think he believes in free speech for people like him, people of his kind of opinion, because this administration and Mr.

Musk and all the cronies have been very hostile to people who work in the area of free speech, like for example, journalists.

The attack on the information media has been more powerful than anything I thought would ever happen in my lifetime in a country like the United States, where the First Amendment is so important.

But no group of people who abuse journalists and who try to get books removed from libraries and so on, they have no right to speak about free speech.

They don't know what it is.

- Do you think America is still a refuge of free expression?

- I think there's still, I don't want to overstate it.

I think there's still a lot of people who care passionately about that, and there are organizations which are fighting back against the attempts to censor books and so on.

So struggling over, but the fact is I thought this was a fight we had won.

- Yeah.

What does it tell you that it hasn't been won?

- Well, just that you have to fight it again.

- Yeah.

- I think there is that thing that the rights you have are the rights you're willing to fight for, and if you don't fight for them, you lose them.

- Yeah.

Earlier this year, I noticed that you told George Packer that you're tired of being seen as a symbol of free speech.

What is the shift from your previous posture on that?

- Well, it's just that every time there's a free speech issue of any kind, my phone starts ringing.

(both laughing) Give me a break.

Free speech, I'm in favor of it.

That's my position.

- (laughing) But you say in the film, to be famous for the wrong thing is a terrible fate.

- [Salman] Mm-hmm.

- Do you fear that you are too tethered to this notion of free speech and not seen as you would like to be seen?

- Well, there is a bit of that, yeah.

But I think all you can do in the end is write your books.

I mean, my dear friend, Martin Amos, who passed away recently, said this very nice thing.

H said, "What you hope is to leave behind the shelf of books "so you can say from here to here, it's me."

- Yeah.

- And I've got 23 so far and 24th coming, so that's a shelf of books.

- When you were a young man at Cambridge, you picked up a book by Jorge Luis Borges called "Fictions," and you became so absorbent while you were reading it in the bookstore that finally the bookseller stopped you and said, "Are you going to buy this book?"

- Which I did.

- You have said that Borges opened many doors in your mind.

- Yes.

- And as you know, over the years, as Jorges aged, he lost his sight.

And in 1977, he spoke to William F. Buckley Jr.

who hosted the original "Firing Line" about what blindness had come to mean to him.

Take a look at what he said.

- Of course, when you're blind, time flows in a different way.

It flows, let's say, down an easy slope.

When I first went blind, I mean, for reading purposes, I felt very unhappy, but now I feel that being blind is, let's say, is part of my world.

- I mean, of course, you lost the use of one eye, but you are not blind.

- [Salman] No.

- But you do have a different ability to employ that sense, and I wonder if there's... Do you feel that it's just part of your world now?

- Well, it has to be.

Long before I was attacked in this way, I always thought that blindness was maybe my greatest fear.

And a lot of writing is about noticing.

I mean, you can notice with your ears as well, to hear how people speak, to see how people behave, to look at what the world looks like and how it changes.

Writing comes out of all those things.

I'm not sure I could do what Borges did, which is to find another way of seeing, if you like.

- Yeah.

You write about Borges (indistinct).

Sometimes when he wrote, he couldn't tell which version of himself he was writing about.

You have said you're not that way, that there are versions of you that people know, and there are versions of you that people don't know.

- I think that in the world we live in now, there's a thing that I think happens to many people who come into the public gaze, which is that there's a public self, which is understood in one way by people, and there's a private self which is known to your family and your friends and nobody else.

I used to be very friendly with the German writer, Nobel Laureate, Winter Grass, and he would say, like Borges, actually, he would say that he felt there were two people, that there was somebody called Gunther who lived in his house and was married to his wife and was the father of his children.

And then there was somebody called Grass, who was this public figure that made a fuss and made a noise.

- Made trouble.

- Made trouble.

And he saw them as different people.

He said, "Sometimes I let Grass go out "and make trouble so I can stay home and do my work."

And other writers have talked, Borges wrote the famous essay, "Borges and I," about that difference between the public self and the private self.

And I think now in this age of so much information and social media and et cetera, et cetera, this sense of a public self being created is even more so than it used to be.

And that public self can be very unlike the private self.

- How does that play out in your life?

- Well, I mean, I think it started after the attack on "The Satanic verses."

There were a lot of negative visions and versions of me floating around, a lot of people saying what a horrible person I was, and not only Islamic people.

So I though this is a very strange thing that everybody, it seems, has an opinion about me, and almost none of them have ever met me.

And I had to spend a lot of my life, I remember I would come into rooms and people would look at me and I'd think they're not looking at me.

They're looking at the thing they think I am.

- Yeah.

- And I would have to somehow get rid of these other Rushdies so that people could see the person that's standing there in front of them.

- If social media had existed in 1989 and its reach and its speed were as effective as they are today, would you have survived?

- No.

- Why are you so sure?

- Because for what you say, the rapid spread of information and the universality of that, it would have made the danger exponentially greater.

I mean, I can't say for sure whether I would have survived.

I hope I might have survived, but it would have been... I mean, it was very dangerous, but it would have been much, much more dangerous.

- You've supported Palestinian statehood for decades.

- Yes, forever.

- But some have sensed a shift in your opinions about the formation of a Palestinian state at the moment because it would mean, I've heard you say a Taliban-like state.

- Well, if it was led by Hamas.

- Yeah.

Now that Hamas has dissolved its governing body, how do you think about the possibility of Palestinian statehood?

- I'm in favor of it.

- [Margaret] Yeah.

- I think the question is, is anyone else?

It used to be the case that most observers felt that the only solution was a two-state solution.

I now feel that there's maybe on both sides of the divide, both on the Israeli side and the Palestinian side, a loss of belief in a two-state solution.

- Well, the flip side would be, do you think that there's an increase in belief in a one-state solution on both sides?

- Well, I think that what people like Netanyahu think is that's what they're after.

They don't want there to be a Palestinian state created.

I mean, people argue that many people of Palestinian ethnicity live in Israel perfectly well.

- Or there are Muslims.

- There are Muslims.

- A million plus in Israel who are able to practice.

I mean, you could say that's a one state solution.

I don't want to go down that road because I don't believe it.

I think there has to be a separate Palestinian entity.

- And a separate Jewish entity.

- And a separate Jewish entity.

- Yeah.

- Yes, for sure.

- Over the years, I have heard you reflect on whether "The Satanic Verses" could be published today.

In 2012, you said likely not.

In 2024, you said, yes, but difficult with social media.

How about now in September of 2026, now that the US is at war with Iran, the threats from Iran's regime have renewed, especially against those who it considers enemies of the state?

- The thing is, "The Satanic Verses" is in print in 2026.

It's published in 50 languages.

- It is, but could it be for the first time now?

- Well, the trouble with hypotheticals is that they're hypothetical.

- Yeah, that is true.

- So I mean, I think when, you know, when I was a student of history at university, and one of the things that I was taught is don't ask the question what if.

Doesn't matter what if.

The question is, what happened and why did it happen?

The study of history is the study of what happened and why did it happen?

And the question of what if is not an interesting question.

- Is it safe to say your next work of fiction that is forthcoming is not about any interpretations of Islam or Muhammad?

- No, I already wrote that book.

- Okay.

(laughing) Salman Rushdie, thank you so much for joining me here today.

It's been a great pleasure.

- Thank you.

(energetic music) - [Announcer] "Firing Line" with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Grenieri, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation, the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation, and by the following.

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