Salman Rushdie grew up in Mumbai as a child of secular Muslims. Among the books he borrowed from the “Reader’s Paradise” district library was the original text of Oriental literature, “1001 Nights”. In the background story, young Sherazade visits a king every night and tells him a story that must be so compelling that he puts off his plan to have her executed because he wants to know what happens next day. She literally talks about her life.
Now Salman Rushdie has told the editor-in-chief of the new YorkerDavid Remnick, his first interview since the assassination on August 11, 2022, and the parallels between the narrators are obvious. Since Iran’s head of state, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa to Salman Rushdie in 1989, calling for his assassination, Rushdie has written 16 novels.
At a reading from his latest novel “Victory City” in front of more than a thousand spectators, a man dressed in black stormed onto the stage and stabbed him several times. Rushdie was in hospital for six weeks and is now blind in his right eye with severe damage to the ulna nerve in his left hand. Feeling in the thumb and forefinger has returned, but typing, Rushdie reports in new Yorkeris still difficult for him.
He has always avoided the term “writer’s block”, now he can’t think of anything
He was also plagued by nightmares, “not about the incident itself, but just frightening.” He’s fine. “I can get up and walk. When I say I’m fine, I mean that some parts of my body need constant check-ups. It was a colossal attack.”
He has always avoided the term “writer’s block”. He knew that if he kept at it, something would happen. In the past few months, however, things have been different. If he tries to write now, he can’t think of anything, “a combination of emptiness and crap, stuff that I write and delete the next day”. He’s not over the hill yet.
According to the fatwa, Rushdie lived under police protection in London for years, but gave it up after moving to New York. If he now asks himself whether he regrets this decision, he cannot find an answer.
The assassin, who had not previously been noticed by the police, is now in a prison not far from the scene of the crime. He faces 25 years in prison for attempted murder. Salman Rushdie says he thinks his assassin is an “idiot” but otherwise doesn’t know what to think of him because he doesn’t know him. There is still a long way to go before the procedure, it may not start until the end of next year. “I guess,” says Rushdie, “then I’ll find out more about him.”