What Happened to Salman Rushdie?

Earlier today, Salman Rushdie, one of the most lauded novelists of our time, released his latest title in the form of a memoir titled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The attempted murder in question, of course, was the one made against him back in the summer of 2022.

The attack took place prior to a lecture that Rushdie was scheduled to give at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, where he was stabbed multiple times by then-24-year-old Islamic extremist Hadi Matar.

The attack’s roots can be traced back to 1988, the year that Rushdie published his magic realism novel The Satanic Verses, the title of which directly references said verses found in the Quran. For this, then-Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (a legal ruling specifically in the context of sharia law) against Rushdie, putting a $3 million bounty on his head and calling for his assassination.

The decade that followed would lead to Rushdie living a heavily-guarded life in the United Kingdom, rife with many other assassination attempts and a surplus of police protection. The state of Iran walked back the ruling in 1998, but attempts on his life still continued, as a fatwa cannot be fully revoked under Shia Islamic tradition. Other deadly conflicts, such as bombings by Islamic extremists and assassination attempts against other figures involved with the book (such as Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, who didn’t survive the attempt on his life), had also occurred in that time.

Rushdie then moved to New York in the early 2000s, where he lived a much safer life and continued on with his illustrious writing career. The ghosts of that fateful fatwa returned in 2022, however, in the form of the aforementioned stabbing attack carried out by Matar, who stated that despite only having read a few pages of The Satanic Verses, he attacked Rushdie over the writer’s criticisms of Islam.

Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder is now available for purchase everywhere.