Salman Rushdie describes moment he was stabbed onstage: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’

Salman Rushdie has for the first time opened up about the 2022 knife attack that nearly claimed his life.

The author, 76, was repeatedly stabbed while preparing to deliver a lecture on free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York two years ago.

The attack took place after a fatwa – assassination order – was placed on the author’s head in 1989 for what was considered in parts of the Islamic world as blasphemous content in his novel, The Satanic Verses.

While this fatwa was removed, the threats against the author’s life persisted, and he has now revealed how he felt when he met his would-be assassin.

“So it’s you. Here you are,” the author recalled thinking. “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past, in order to kill me.”

Rushdie offended parts of the Islamic world with his 1988 novel, which included derogatory depictions of the Prophet Muhammed.

He was ultimately forced into hiding as a result, but eventually stepped back into the public eye again, believing that any serious threats against his life were in the past.

The author lost his sight in one eye as a result of the attack (PA Archive)

Hadi Matar, then 24, is accused of attacking Rushdie and has been held without bail since the August 2022 attack.

While he has pled not guilty to the charges against him, he has admitted to disliking the author because of his treatment of Islam.

He said: “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person.

“He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.”

Rushdie’s interview comes ahead of the release of his new memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

Reading from the new memoir, the Booker Prize winner said: “In the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile.

Hadi Matar is accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

“I confess, 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.’”

After the attack, Rushdie remained in hospital for six weeks. “One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, ‘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’,” Rushdie told Anderson Cooper on CBS’s 60 Minutes in his first television interview since the attack.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is being released on 16 April.

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