In Knife, his memoir of surviving attack, Salman Rushdie confronts a world where liberal principles like free speech are old-fashioned

• A man named Hadi Matar has been charged with second-degree attempted murder.
• He is an American-born resident of New Jersey in his early twenties, whose parents emigrated from Lebanon.
• Review: Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape) Knife is very good at recalling Rushdie’s grim memories of the attack.

• “Let me offer this piece of advice to you, gentle reader,” he says: “if you can avoid having your eyelid sewn shut … avoid it.
• Here, for a number of reasons, Rushdie is not on such secure ground.
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  Rushdie, who studied history at Cambridge University, described himself in Joseph Anton as “a historian by training”.

• Indeed, a speech he gave at PEN America in 2022 is reprinted in the book verbatim.
• For these intellectuals, principles of secular reason and personal liberty should always supersede blind conformity to social or religious authority.

Old-fashioned liberal principles

• In Knife, though, Rushdie the protagonist confronts a world where such liberal principles now appear old-fashioned.
• He claims “the groupthink of radical Islam” has been shaped by “the groupthink-manufacturing giants, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter”.
• But for many non-religious younger people, any notion of free choice also appears illusory, the anachronistic residue of an earlier age.
• Millennials and Generation Z are concerned primarily with issues of environmental catastrophe and social justice, and they tend to regard liberal individualism as both ineffective and self-indulgent.
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Suffused in the culture of Islam

• The Satanic Verses itself is suffused in the culture of Islam as much as James Joyce’s Ulysses is suffused in the culture of Catholicism.
• In their hypothetical conversation, the author of Knife tries to convince his assailant of the value of such ambivalence.
• He protests how his notorious novel revolves around “an East London Indian family running a café-restaurant, portrayed with real love”.

Attachment to past traditions

• Rushdie discusses in Knife how, besides the Hindu legends of his youth, he has also been “more influenced by the Christian world than I realized”.
• He cites the music of Handel and the art of Michelangelo as particular influences.
• Yet this again highlights Rushdie’s attachments to traditions firmly rooted in the past.
• Part of James’s greatness lay in the way he was able to accommodate these radical shifts within his writing.

‘A curiously one-eyed book’

• Particularly striking are the immediacy with which he recalls the shocking assault, the black humour with which he relates medical procedures and the sense of “exhilaration” at finally returning home with his wife to Manhattan.
• Yet there are also many loose ends, and the book’s conclusion, that the assailant has in the end become “simply irrelevant” to him, is implausible.
• He insists he does not want to write “frightened” or “revenge” books.

• This was despite several brave comeback attempts by Milburn that likewise cited Pataudi as an example.
• Knife, by contrast, is a curiously one-eyed book, in a metaphorical, as well as a literal sense.

Paul Giles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.