Primary Topic
This episode explores the life and experiences of Salman Rushdie, focusing on the misconceptions surrounding him due to his controversial work, "The Satanic Verses," and the resulting fatwa.
Episode Summary
Main Takeaways
- Rushdie's identity has been significantly shaped by public misconceptions, largely due to his literary work.
- The fatwa and its repercussions continue to affect Rushdie, manifesting in both his personal life and his perception by others.
- Rushdie discusses the broader implications of social media in shaping public narratives and personal identities.
- The episode highlights the physical and psychological impacts of the stabbing on Rushdie, underscoring his resilience and determination to continue his literary career.
- Through "Knife," Rushdie takes control of his narrative, using his experience and skill to articulate the complexities of his existence and public persona.
Episode Chapters
1: Introduction
The episode opens with Ezra Klein introducing Salman Rushdie, setting the stage for a deep dive into his life and the misconceptions around him.
Ezra Klein: "Salman Rushdie, a name synonymous with controversy over his novel, 'The Satanic Verses.'"
2: Misconceptions and Identity
Rushdie discusses how his identity has been overshadowed by the global reactions to his work, affecting personal and public perceptions.
Salman Rushdie: "I have never known who Salman Rushdie is, and maybe not just him."
3: Impact of Social Media
The discussion pivots to the role of social media in crafting and reinforcing public images, which often diverge significantly from reality.
Salman Rushdie: "People believe the shadow and don't believe the self."
4: Personal Impact of the Fatwa
Rushdie shares insights into the personal toll the fatwa has taken on him, including the recent physical attack he survived.
Salman Rushdie: "The biggest damage was to people's thinking about my writing."
5: Conclusion
The episode concludes with reflections on the personal and literary journey of Rushdie, emphasizing his ongoing fight to define himself beyond the shadows cast by others.
Ezra Klein: "Thank you for sharing your profound insights and personal story."
Actionable Advice
- Question narratives shaped by media and social platforms.
- Embrace the complexity of individual identities beyond public perceptions.
- Support free expression, recognizing the personal risks faced by some authors.
- Engage critically with literature and media to form informed opinions.
- Foster empathy for those whose lives are impacted by global narratives.
About This Episode
Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel, “The Satanic Verses,” made him the target of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who denounced the book as blasphemous and issued a fatwa calling for his assassination. Rushdie spent years trying to escape the shadow the fatwa cast on him, and for some time, he thought he succeeded. But in 2022, an assailant attacked him onstage at a speaking engagement in western New York and nearly killed him.
“I think now I’ll never be able to escape it. No matter what I’ve already written or may now write, I’ll always be the guy who got knifed,” he writes in his new memoir, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”
In this conversation, I asked Rushdie to reflect on his desire to escape the fatwa; the gap between the reputation of his novels and their actual merits; how his “shadow selves” became more real to millions than he was; how many of us in the internet age also have to contend with our many shadow selves; what Rushdie lives for now; and more.
People
Salman Rushdie, Ezra Klein
Companies
The New York Times
Books
"The Satanic Verses," "Knife"
Guest Name(s):
Salman Rushdie
Content Warnings:
None
Transcript
Ezra Klein
From New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein show.
I feel like I've always known who Salman Rushdie is. Long before I read literary fiction, he just sat in my consciousness as the author of this eerie sounding novel called the Satanic Verses, a novel so somehow dangerous he had to go into hiding after the supreme leader of Iran said he and anyone involved in it should be killed for blaspheming Islam. So Rushdie sat there in the back of my mind for decades. I didn't think much about him. The whole story felt like this weird relic of the eighties.
But then in August of 2022, I saw the news that a fanatic with a knife had tried to carry out the fatwa, had attacked Rushdie during a speech and nearly killed him. There was confusion and panic. The attack happened in full view of the audience, with Sir Salman left injured, lying on stage and eyewitnesses in deep shock. Witnesses say Rushdie's attacker stabbed him ten to 15 times before members of the audience grabbed him and restrained him. Rushdie is currently on a ventilator, unable to speak.
According to his book agent, the 75 year old's liver was punctured. He suffered severe nerve damage to his arm and will likely lose an eye. Rushdie was attacked yesterday morning in front of roughly 25. Rushdie survived, though he lost an eye to the attack and the recovery and the rehabilitation was grueling. And he began to write again.
And his latest book, Knife, is about the attack. It's about his life. It's about his marriage. It's about his children. And I think at its core, it's about something else, too.
It's about the invention of other versions of him that became more real in the world than he was, other versions of him that almost got him killed. And this is what I now understand after reading knife, what I now understand after I went back and read for the first time the satanic verses. I have never known who Salman Rushdie is, and maybe not just him. How many people out there do I wrongly think that I know? As always, our email for guest suggestions and reflections.
Ezra Klein shown nytimes.com dot Salman Rushdie. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Good to be with you. I want to begin with a story you mentioned a little bit offhandedly in the book, which is this story about the shadow by Hans Christian Andersen.
Salman Rushdie
Yeah, the shadow, I think, is my favorite story of his. It's about a man whose shadow gets detached from him and goes away for many years. He loses his shadow. The shadow has traveled the world. The shadow is quite sophisticated and cool and in some ways is more interesting than the man.
And the shadow returns, and the man and the shadow spend some time together. And then the man meets this princess who hes very taken by and interested in. And the princess decides that she prefers the shadow to the man. And actually the shadow manages to persuade her that hes the real thing and the man is the echo or the phony or the shadow. And so in the end, the shadow manages to arrange for the man to be executed.
So the shadow takes over the life of the man. So what did that story mean to you? Why put it in this book? It meant to me that a thing that happens more and more often, I think, is that a shadow self can separate itself from the person and end up becoming in some way more real than the original person. People believe the shadow and don't believe the self.
Ezra Klein
So if I'd asked you in 1980, 619 87 to describe how you understood yourself, what kind of person you were, what kind of writer you were, what would your capsule sense of Salman Rushdie. Have been in the eighties? It was actually a very good decade for me because it began in 1981 with the publication and success of Midnight's Children, which was important to me for a number of reasons. First of all, because it was my first literary success and there's kind of nothing quite like first success. Secondly, that it financially allowed me to begin to live as a writer rather than having to work in advertising, which I'd been doing.
Salman Rushdie
And it also deeply reconnected me to India, which I worried, living in London, that I was kind of drifting away from those roots. And the novel was a very conscious attempt to try and reclaim them. And that was actually what made me happiest about the reception of the book was the way in which it was received in India and the way in which it made. Made me feel the eighties were a very happy time for me. I was doing well.
Ezra Klein
If that's how you felt about you, who was the public? You. I mean, I had become identified as one of a kind of rising group of british based writers. Writers like Ian McKeown and Kazue Shigeru and Martin amis and Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson. And there's a bunch of us all roughly coming up at the same time.
Salman Rushdie
And we got identified as this kind of special generation. And so there was that I also had become perhaps a little bit more politically engaged than some of the others. So I had written and done things on television about racism in England and postcolonialism. The remnants of the empire. And so I was also associated with that kind of subject.
And then came the satanic verses, and it changed everything. When you began writing the satanic verses, what did you understand yourself to be doing? What kind of book were you writing? So I was writing these three stories. One was about a character with name Gibril, which is the indian version of Gabriel, who was a movie actor who was losing his mind and arrives rather dramatically as a result of airplane explosion in 1980s London at a time when the race relations situation was quite tense.
And this is a period of Margaret Thatcher's government. And I guess what I thought I was doing was thinking about what happens to people when they migrate from one culture to another and how much of their identity is brought into question by doing that. Suddenly they're in a language that isn't their first language, and they're in a community that doesn't know them. And they very often are in a belief system, surrounded by a belief system, or systems which are different from their own. And so they face all these challenges.
And I remember thinking, well, if that's what I think, then I should try and make the novel itself that kind of challenge. And so the question of religious belief and so on becomes one of the subjects of the book. Jibreel having these dreams about the birth of a religion. And I thought I'd made sufficient distance because in the novel and in his dreams, the religion is not called Islam, and the prophet is not called Muhammad, and the city is not called Mecca. And all this is happening in the dreams of somebody who's losing his mind.
I thought, you know, this is what we call fiction. Yeah, some people took it the wrong way. What is it literally in the book? What is the actual story you tell in the book that causes this offense? Well, of course, the people who attacked the book had not read it.
So there's that. But there is a well known story that is in many of the traditions of Islam. To put it simply, there were three very successful, popular winged goddesses in Mecca at the time whose temples were at the gates of the city. It's a big trading city. So people would come and go through the gates, and they would make offerings at these temples, or, put it another way, pay taxes.
So the families that ran these temples were very wealthy and powerful in the city. And so the theory is that the prophet was offered a deal, and the story goes that he comes down from the mountain and recites some verses which accept the status of these goddesses at the level of the angels. And then we don't know what happens, but it seems as if there was a lot of opposition to his statement from amongst the new faithful. And then after a short, a period of time that's unclear, he rejects those verses and he says that the devil spoke to him in the guise of the angel and that these were satanic verses which should be expunged from the Quran, which they were, and replaced by other verses in which he discounts these goddesses. So that's the episode about a possible temptation and then the rejection of the temptation.
And I thought, you know, that exists in many religious traditions. And actually he comes out of it quite well. So, I mean, I came across this story when I was at university, when I was at Cambridge. And one of the things I was studying was early islamic history. And I came across this story and I remember thinking, good story.
And that was 19, 68, 20 years later, I found out how good a story it was. When the book comes out, I was going back to try to understand the timeline here, the fatwa against you, and I hadn't understood this. Anybody involved in the publication of the book, that doesn't happen for five months or so. Five or six months, yeah. So what is the initial reaction to the book when people first get their hands on it?
Ezra Klein
What do the reviewers say? How do you understand? Because there's always a difference. How do you understand that people have understood the book? Well, the reviews were good, but not sensational.
Salman Rushdie
There was one review I remember, which in retrospect seems amusing, where the reviewer said, what's all this stuff about Muslims doing in a novel about London? I guess now they know.
Ezra Klein
Yeah, that one doesn't age well. No, but it was nominated for the Booker Prize, so it did pretty well. And actually, I'm told that the one or two english language bookstores in Iran were happily stocking it without any problem. And then came the moment of the fatwa. And then things got much nastier.
Salman Rushdie
Khomeini called for the death of british writer Salman Rushdie. We want Rushdie to be hanged. Do you see?
Rushdie, who comes from a muslim family himself, went into hiding, moving to another location. Every time Scotland Yards special branch thinks it prudent that he do so. To the best of your understanding now, why does the fatwa happen? Well, there's a political reason why it happens, which is that chronologically, the moment in Iran at which it happened was very soon after the end of the Iran Iraq war, in which essentially a whole generation of young iranian people had died for no gain. And the revolution was probably more unpopular and in greater danger at that moment than at any other moment.
And I think, frankly, Khomeini was looking for a way of rallying the troops. And unfortunately, I became it. And there's also in my reading, some amount of competition at that time between Ezra is actually now between Saudi Arabia and Iran on who will be the leader of the worldwide Muslim for sure. And they competed over their opposition to my book as well, certainly initially in the UK. Anyway, a lot of the demonstrations that began to happen around the book were funded out of Saudi Arabia, as far as I'm told.
And then the iranian fatwa came and hijacked it. So they kind of piggybacked on what initially had been the saudi led protest and took it over. During the course of the nine years or so of the police protection, I was told maybe six times that there were serious assassination attempts underway, that people had entered the country with an intention of carrying out the threat. Other people involved with the book in other countries were attacked and killed, which is something I did not know. Yeah.
I mean, the worst thing was the japanese translator of the book, who was a college professor who was actually a specialist in islamic history and art and who translated the book into japanese, was murdered one night near his office on campus in Japan. And my italian translator was attacked at his residence, unfortunately survived. And my norwegian publisher was shot several times in the back while getting up in the morning to go to work. And he also kind of miraculously survived. I felt horrible because they felt like these were proxy attacks, that they really wanted me.
They couldn't get at me, so they got at them. And I remember calling William Nigard, who was my norwegian publisher, to apologize to him. And he said, salman, dont apologize. Im a grown up. I knew that I wanted to publish the satanic verses, and im very happy that I did.
And then in a kind of wonderfully publishing way, he said, guess what? Ive just ordered a very large reprint. I guess in publishing, that is the best revenge. I mean, theres occasions where I felt myself in the company of really brave people. And I think if youve just been shot three times in the back and your reaction to that is to order a reprint, that's courage.
Ezra Klein
So I had not read the satanic verses until preparing for the show with you. And I think if you had never told me anything about it, I would never have assumed there had been any reaction to it at all. It reminded me as a book more than anything else as I read it, of White Keith by Zadie Smith, which I think the causality goes the other way around. Yes. I mean, she said you're an influence on her.
So I just understood that because I read it first. It's a very fun, stuffed, manic, exciting, imaginative novel, but it's nothing like what I had believed. No, it's true that the novel that was invented for public obloquy doesn't actually exist. And I've had it happen to me. I can't even tell you how many times that people who like you have finally got around to reading the book have said to me, well, where's the problem?
Salman Rushdie
Where's the dirty bit? If you like, they don't see that it's there. The other thing people say to me is, who knew it was funny? Well, that was actually my first reaction. I didn't expect the tone of the book at all.
Ezra Klein
It wasn't the tone I assumed of the book. It wasn't the tone I assumed of you. It's very funny, it's very alive. You know, before the satanic verses, the books I wrote before that, people thought they were funny. People would write about me as a funny writer.
Salman Rushdie
That was often mentioned in what was said about me. And after the satanic verses, for a long time nobody wrote about me as a funny writer. It was as if because the thing that had happened to me was not funny, that was kind of dark and obscurely theological. It was assumed that I must be dark and obscurely theological. It was as if the characteristics of the attack were transposed onto the person being attacked.
So I became the personification of the characteristics of the attack. And that other me who was funny and antic and interested in mythology and fantasy and politics and history, that person vanished. In a way. The biggest damage that the attack on the satanic verses did to me was not physical danger. It was a damage to people's thinking about my writing.
And a lot of people, I think, who might have enjoyed the book and might have enjoyed my books in general have been put off by the kind of shadow of the islamist attack. But it was almost universally true that the people who attacked it did not read it. I mean, I remember seeing a television interview when I was still living in England with one of the leaders of the indian muslim protest against the book. And the television reporters asked him if he'd read it and he said this rather wonderful thing. He said, no.
He said, I don't need to walk in the gutter to know that it contains filthy. So that was the kind of attitude, you don't need to read it. It's just bad. And so in that way, the book, no less than the person, can have a shadow. Yeah, it was really upsetting to me, which is why in those early days, you know, there were a lot of people who were defending me, my right not to be murdered and so on.
But I kept saying to them, could you please defend the text? Defend the book. Not that many people did that. In fact, there was a kind of gag going around in those days that the book was impossible to read, unreadable, which was a way of excusing yourself from reading it.
Ezra Klein
So we talked a bit about who you were understood as publicly before the book, right. What the sort of public salmon was. And as I understood you describe it, you're a kind of postcolonial writer, to the extent you're a man of politics, a man, roughly, of the left, critical of Thatcher, who emerges now. Well, what happened is that entire self, that had been how I was seen and how I thought of myself for a decade, was just erased overnight. It's as if it didn't exist.
Salman Rushdie
And what was created instead was this irresponsible, selfish, arrogant, bad writer and bad person who had deliberately set out to offend the great world religion and only just about deserved to be protected from harm. Only just about. So I ask this because there's a dynamic I want to trace here about the way when there is a chasm between the self and the public shadow, the book and its public shadow, that people feel a need to harmonize the two, not side with one or the other, but assume that there must be some logic that connects the two. So talk through that reaction of the west, the kind of people who wanted to harmonize. It was very shocking.
I mean, first of all, I had been quite a vocal critic of the Margaret Thatcher government, and then that was the government that had to offer me protection. So on the one hand, there were accusations of hypocrisy. Oh, you have been knocking the government until they have to save your skin, and then you take the protection and save your sorry ass. There was some of that. There was just some of just straightforward political opposition.
There were people whose politics were not like mine, actually, members of the government cabinet, who said rude things about the book. And then there was a very upsetting kind of literary strain to the hostility writers, I wouldn't expect, like John Berger, Jermaine Greer, John le Carre, one of that group, said, nobody can insult a great world religion with impunity. As if to say, if you do that, then you don't deserve to be safe. But I remember being very surprised to find Jimmy Carter on the side of the detractors. That was almost more shocking to me than the islamic attack, because I thought, you know, the iranian regime is a tyrannical, authoritarian regime, and if it behaves in a tyrannical, authoritarian way, it's not entirely surprising.
But to have western artists and intellectuals doing that was very, very upsetting. And in India, too. In India, too, when my ethnic origin is that my family was originally kashmiri, in the north of India, Pakistanis would say, not so much the north of India, but we were kashmiri family. And I've written a lot about Kashmir. I wrote about it in midnight children.
I wrote about it in Shalimar the clown. And I now know, because a kind of jihadist mindset has increased in Kashmir, that if I were to go there, I might not be safe. And that feels horrible, that the place from which my family comes is a place to which I can't safely go. Both my parents are buried in Karachi, Pakistan, and there's no way I can ever go and visit their grave. This kind of thing is just deeply troubling to me.
Ezra Klein
I mean, obviously, you do not like the version of yourself that was created that was worthy of being murdered, or worthy of at least the overreaction of being murdered. What was your relationship? What is your relationship to the more sainted, public version of yourself? The symbol? I mean, you know, I mean, thank you very much.
Salman Rushdie
It's nice for people to be nice about you, but I never felt symbolic. You know, the statue in the harbor, that's a symbol. I feel like a working artist, and I would like to be known and judged by the work that I make. Having said that, I was involved in the free speech issue before anything happened to me. I was working with the british branch of Penn, trying to defend various writers in trouble in various parts of the world.
I was doing my bit for that effort, and then a lot of writers organizations really came out to bat for me. It really stood up for me, and I was very grateful for that. And so that became a part of how I saw myself, I have to say, a secondary part, because I still think the person who sits alone in a room and makes things up is who I really am. Tell me a bit about that dynamic, because you kept writing. Yeah.
Ezra Klein
How did your writing change under this pressure? Well, I tried to not let it change. I remember thinking very consciously, quite early, after the fatwa and all that. Of course, there was physical danger, but there was also artistic danger. There were ways in which this attack could destroy me as an artist.
Salman Rushdie
It could frighten me. And so then I would not write anything risky. I would write safe, little frightened books. Or it would fill me so much with anger and a desire for revenge that I would write revenge books. And I told myself that both of those would be the destruction of my artistic independence.
And whatever quality I have as a writer, it would destroy. I think probably one of the greatest acts of will that ive ever performed in my life was to try and not let my writing be knocked off track by the attack on the satanic verses. You moved to New York, what, year? 2000? And that then becomes another shadow self that you talk about some in the book where you develop, after moving to New York, a reputation, as I think you call it, salman the party animal.
Party boy. Yeah. I'm truly not. Would you own it if you were? No, I actually don't really like big parties.
I'm sociable. That's true. I am quite sociable. But I like to see my friends one at a time or two or three at a time so we can actually talk to each other. But what happened was, when I started living in New York is I realized that it wasn't so much a question of me being frightened as people being frightened of me, people being scared to be around me because of the threat of danger hovering like a dark angel over my head.
And I thought, the only way I can get rid of that is to behave in a way that is not scared. If people can see that I'm not being scared, then maybe they'll stop being scared. And so I deliberately embarked on a policy of public visibility, going to places where I knew I'd be photographed and where, you know, the New York Post would write about me. And it worked because after quite a short period of time, people thought, oh, yeah, he's just here and he's around and about, and it's fine. And that was what I wanted to achieve.
And then it kind of went too far that I turned into this butterfly, this social butterfly, which, in my view, I'm not really. But so that's interesting to me, the way you had to act in relationship again to these public selves. Now you're the one who has to reconcile through your own behavior. You have to change who you are to try to change who people think you are and what comfort they have around you. Yeah, I'm gonna try something a little tricky here.
Ezra Klein
And I don't in any way want to trivialize the violence, the terror that you've lived through. I was struck with the thought that you have for decades now lived in the most extreme possible version of what seems to me to be a very modern condition in which little scraps of yourself, scraps of things you've written or echoes of interpretations of things you've written, ricochet around an Internet or a world and create this other version of you that people begin to believe in. Yes, and I think this happens again in a very small and much less terrorizing way to people all the time. On TikTok, on Facebook, on X, they say something or they said things, or they've been a person, and soon a version of them emerges that is more real to other people than they are. Yes.
Do you think this is a more common thing? Well, I certainly agree entirely with how you describe the creation of false selves by this new weapon of social media. I've often thought that if these things had existed in 1989, I would have been in far more danger, because the speed with which material can be transmitted is so much greater. The way in which groupthink can be created and mobs can be created would have enormously escalated the danger. At that time, the most sophisticated method of transmission was the fax machine, and that kept the lid on it to some degree, until Khomeini blew the lid off.
Salman Rushdie
I know that there are two or three graphics containing absolutely false quotes from me, things I've never even come close to saying, which keep cropping up. People keep retweeting them and repeating them. And even though I have once or twice said, look, this is nonsense, I'd never said this, that doesn't stop it. It just keeps going. So there are quotes ascribed to me, views ascribed to me, which I don't hold, which are antithetical to things that I think.
But they're out there. I mean, I think to some degree, it's always been the case before social media that there's a disconnect between the private self of the writer and the way in which they're publicly perceived. I mean, I wrote a little bit about this. I said, various writers, Gunter Grass, Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene, they all had this sense of there being a public self, which wasn't quite them, but which was how they were seen. And I had a kind of magnified version of that, I think.
And social media certainly helps to magnify it. I mean, I think on some level, that has always been true for everybody. Right there is the person we are, although I'm not somebody who believes that is a very stable concept. No, that's an unstable concept. And then the way we are seen by our families, by our friends, by our lovers, by our antagonists, by our colleagues, whomever.
Ezra Klein
The thing that feels different, something extraordinary typically had to happen for the distance between your private self and your public self to matter at any significant scale. Yeah, but what strikes me is that the experience at a modest level has been democratized. Yes. The number of people who are not famous, who are not a well known writer, who do not have demonstrations in the street against him, who can nevertheless become the main character on social media, who can see a version of them just ricochet through local high schools as people post something about them on Facebook or on Instagram, and then everybody else is commenting. I mean, kids commit suicide around this.
Salman Rushdie
All the time now. Yes, they do. It does feel to me like a difficulty of being just alive now. I mean, when these things arrived, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I thought, this is very interesting, and it's a new way of talking to each other. And certainly, if you're a writer, it's a way of talking to your readers without any intermediary.
And that's enjoyable. And for a moment, I participated in this and was quite enjoying it. I think maybe it changed and the world changed in the way that you're describing. But I suddenly began to think, this is a room containing people that I don't want to be in the room with. And so I backed away from it very dramatically.
Ezra Klein
One of the things I was thinking about reading your book is I know people who have gone through public scandal who didn't deserve it, who hadn't done the thing, or there really was no thing. One thing I've noticed is many of them go through a period, sometimes don't even get out of the period, of believing they must somehow deserve it. Right? They do the reconciliation in their own head, even if they didn't do the thing that they're being denounced for, or it's not even clear what they're being denounced for, they almost have to believe they did something deserving of it for their reality to make sense to them. They begin, they do the violence to themselves of believing in the shadow self.
Right. More than they still believe in themselves. Did that happen to you? Yeah, it did. Right at the beginning, I began to believe that two things, that, first of all, there was a kind of category mistake about the satanic verses, which was being treated as a work of polemical fact, whereas actually as a work of imagination and fiction.
Salman Rushdie
If I could just explain that this is not fact, this is fiction, that people would say, oh, yeah, we get it now. That was kind of foolish, but I thought it. And then I thought, if I can just explain in interviews and essays and so on who I am and what I thought I was doing and why, I believe it to be completely legitimate, that people would again go, oh, gosh, we made a terrible mistake. Yeah, he's a nice guy, after all. Let's stop.
And then there was a period, I mean, about a year or year and a half into the story, when I was very, very depressed. I was in really quite deep depression about everything and didn't see how it would ever end. And I thought, maybe what I have to do is to reach out to the muslim community and try and apologize. And I did, and it rebounded very hard in my face. And actually, my sister, who I love and is closer to me than anybody else in the world, she's one year younger than me.
She describes herself, my much younger sister called me when she heard me making these apologias. She said, what the hell are you doing? Have you lost your mind? And I thought, you know, yes, I have. Yes, I have.
I'm behaving in a deranged way. And that felt to me like hitting rock bottom. I hate that this is true about culture right now. I don't know that I've ever seen it be the case, or at least very rarely seen it be the case, that apologizing, whether the person did something or did not do something helps. Because what apologizing seems to me to do now is it gives people the license to believe that it was all justified in the first place.
Ezra Klein
It's you submitting to the reality. That's why, in a way, I think there's a crazed power to people like Donald Trump who exist in a world without, I think, personal shame, because they don't apologize. They're able to keep the instability of the different realities coherent. I never lost the election. I never did anything wrong.
I never did any of it. So there never needs to be a moment where the people who are on their side have to reconcile, for sure, a mission of wrongdoing, whereas the people who try to come out and be decent people about it and say, I did do something terribly wrong here. Suffer. Suffer. No.
Salman Rushdie
Shamelessness is the great public weapon of our time. Yes, if you really have it. And yes, of course he does, in spades. You can do what he has done, which is to spend a lifetime getting away with it. I mean, not just since he's been in politics, but way before then.
I mean, getting away with it is his great skill. And the tool that he uses is absolute lack of shame. And, I mean, I would put in a miniature way, the ex british prime minister Boris Johnson, in the same bag, absolute total liar in everything he says and does, and totally shameless about it and gets away with it until he didn't. I mean, I do think this. We live in this age, right, where you have a global community, an algorithmic global community, and communities discipline, in the first instance, through the application of shame, through shaming each other and eliciting shame in each other.
Ezra Klein
And that's a supercharged dynamic in modern life. And so if you happen to be immune to it, if you happen in ways that are, I would suspect, usually quite personally destructive, to be immune to it is often a very important disciplining emotion. It's a superpower. It becomes, as you put it, a superpower. Yeah.
Salman Rushdie
I find myself withdrawing from this modern world as much as I can. So this is maybe a function of being almost 77 years old, but I really go less and less towards social media. I barely use it now, and every time I go there, I kind of wish I hadn't. So I think maybe I'll just, whatever years are left to me, manage to do it without being a part of the modern world.
Ezra Klein
So let's go quite a bit forward in time. It's 2022. It's before the Chautauqua event, where the attack happens. At this point, who are you to you? And who do you think you are at that point, to the public?
Salman Rushdie
So I genuinely thought that the risk was in the past, and I had 22 years of evidence for that. So it wasn't unreasonable to believe that at this point, I had more or less completely regained, let's say, the life of a writer, where I was doing everything that writers get asked to do. I was doing book tours and literary festivals and lectures and readings and all of that, especially after near sequestration. It was very pleasant to be back in the world. I mean, it used to be, you know, that some airlines were scared to carry me, and people in restaurants would look uneasy if I walked in the room and I was going to Yankee Stadium and concerts at the garden.
And just leading an ordinary life felt very okay doing it. It used to be the case that every time I published a book, the writing about it would begin by restating the stuff that happened around the satanic verses, and the new book would be judged in the shadow of that event. And that kind of stopped happening as I went on writing and publishing more books of very different kinds. People began to respond to my work just as work, not as the latest creation of this dark individual. So where are you on August 12?
There, I just finished. But I mean, physically, where are you physically? Oh, I was in New York City. And then on August 11, I had flown up to do an event at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, in western New York, which is deeply. Ironically, an event for asylum for writers.
Yeah. What had happened was that my friend Henry Reese had for many years, like 20 years, been running a kind of asylum program in Pittsburgh. He had a whole little street of houses which he made available to writers from various countries who needed a safe place. And they, Chautauqua had invited Henry to come and talk about that, and he asked me if I would come and have the conversation with him. So I had actually gone there to talk about him and his project and the success of his project.
And then, yeah, it turned out that I was the one who needed protection. What happened? Well, we had just come out on stage and, I mean, the Chautauqua amphitheater is a very large space. Actually, when it's full, it, I believe, can seat like 4000 people. And there were probably something like 1500 people there in the morning.
1030, 1045 in the morning. Very beautiful sunny day in August. And Henry and I came out and were introduced by someone from the institution. We were sitting in chairs on the stage, and almost the moment the introduction was over, we really had no time to start our conversation because I saw this man approaching rapidly from my right and to my right. There was a small flight of stairs, like four or five stairs, and he came sprinting up the steps and attacked me.
Ezra Klein
When you are writing through this in the book, you talk a bit about freezing, and you have a line that I've been thinking about since I read it. Where you write this is as close to understanding my inaction as I've been able to get. The targets of violence experience a crisis in their understanding of the real. What do you mean? Well, I mean that we all world live in a picture of the real.
Salman Rushdie
You know, we all have a kind of sense of how things are, you know, and that sense of how things are is our reality. And then when something calamitous happens, you know, somebody arrives in a school with an assault rifle, somebody arrives in a church with a gun or in a shopping mall, you know, everybody in those locations has a picture of what they're doing. If you're in a church, you're there for reasons of belief and worship. If you're in a shopping mall, you're there to shop. If you're in a school, you're there to be at school.
And that's how you see the world. And the explosion of violence into that picture destroys that reality. And then you literally don't know the shape of the world. And very often I think people are paralyzed and don't know what to do. How do you act in a moment when the thing that's happened isn't a part of the narrative you think you're in?
And that's what happened to me. I thought I was froze. The attack was a knife attack. And you write that a gunshot is action at a distance, but a knife attack is a kind of intimacy. Yes.
Ezra Klein
What's intimate about it? Well, it's right up against you, you know. I mean, this guy was. There wasn't even an inch of space between him and me. And he's not shooting from a distance, he's not shooting an arrow.
Salman Rushdie
He's right up in my face, sticking a knife at me. And then, of course, I fell down and he was on top of me. So that's about as intimate as you can get to be underneath somebody who's on top of you. I mean, there are other occasions when that happens and those are more pleasurable. I realized when I read you write this, I thought about the intimacy of it for you.
Ezra Klein
And it's only hearing you say it that I think about the intimacy for him. Yeah, right. I'm not saying I can imagine standing 50ft away from somebody and shooting them, but the idea of charging them and. Sticking a knife in their neck, jumping. On them, sticking a knife in their neck, in their eyes, slashing at them.
Salman Rushdie
I don't know what state of mind you have to be in to make it possible to do that. You're trained your entire life socially. I mean, I feel weird asking somebody for the time. It's just too close up. Some of the book is about trying to understand him.
Ezra Klein
What do you know about the attacker? How did he end up there? And how did he end up there with the level of hatred or determination? Well, I know very little. I mean, there have been just a couple of newspaper reports on which I based my knowledge of him.
Salman Rushdie
There was one interview that he gave from prison to the New York Post in which he said a little bit about his life. And then there was a second interview, I forget in which journal that his mother gave about her horrified reaction to what had happened and what seems to be the story, as far as I can piece it together is that his parents were of lebanese origin. They moved to the united states, and he was born and raised in Jersey. His parents separated. His father went back to Lebanon.
His mother stayed in New Jersey with himself and his sisters. And until he was approximately. I don't know exactly, but approximately 19 ish years old. That's all he was. He was a kid growing up in Jersey and had no criminal record.
And then at about that time, he chooses to go to Lebanon to visit his father. And according to his mother, when he first got there, his father lives in a village which is very near the israeli border and is very strongly Hezbollah village, with billboards of Hezbollah heroes around the streets. His mother says that when he first got there, he really didn't like it. He wanted to come home right away, but he stayed only for about a month, and he came back a month later, and according to his mother, had completely transformed, was a different person, and was now angry with her for not having taught him properly about religion. His mother's house in Fairview has a basement, and he went and sequestered himself in the basement, lived separately from everyone else, playing video games and watching YouTube videos.
Essentially, he lived, as far as I can see, a pretty solitary kind of loners life for something like four years between his visit to Lebanon and his decision to attack me. And somehow in that period of time, he becomes the kind of person who can commit murder. And then at a certain point, he sees something on Twitter from the Chautauqua institution announcing their program of events. And he saw that I was listed amongst the program of events and then decided to make his plan. Wait.
Ezra Klein
He sees an advertisement from the small literary foundation? Yeah. And on that, your life turns. Yes. The efficacy of Twitter advertising.
Salman Rushdie
This appears to be the case. The idea that he could become someone who could murder seems in some ways less improbable than that you could end up as his target. This is somebody born after the satanic versus if I'm not wrong and you're just not there anymore, there's a lot that has happened. The war on terrorism, the invasion of Iraq. So much has happened.
The subject has changed. The subject has changed. How does he end up focusing on you? How does he end up even knowing who you are? This is what I don't know.
I mean, there's an absence in my understanding of him. I mean, I can guess that while he was with his father in this very Hezbollah dominated village, that somebody might have mentioned my name as a bad guy, anti Muslim, whatever. And it may be that that was triggered by his seeing something on social media about my upcoming talk. But I don't really know. I mean, actually, I remember saying to my editor at Random House that if I was to write a story in which somebody, by his own admission, had read only two pages of somebody's writing and seen a couple of YouTube videos and then were to decide to murder that person, my editor would say to me, that's not convincing.
It's not enough motivation. Yeah. You say in the book that your attempted murder seemed undermotivated, which is one of the funnier, I mean, darkly funny lines I've read in a while. You know, I was thinking about Iago and Othello, that the only thing that happens to Iago is that he's passed over for a promotion. That's it.
That's his beef. And because of that, he decides to destroy the lives of two people, Othello and Desdemona, for no reason, just bad. And I often wondered about, is there such a thing? Is there such a thing as a person like that who is simply evil, just a bad guy, doesn't need much of a motive. And the reason that doesn't quite work in this case is because such scraps of information as we have about him prior to his visit to Lebanon, Arthur, he was a perfectly nice person.
No problem. Well liked that. The transformation is what's interesting, but there's. A way in which, in addition to him being a bit of a cipher to you, he's trying to kill some other version of you. The thing that struck me so much about, he doesn't actually know anything about you.
Ezra Klein
He didn't really case the target. No, he didn't do his. He didn't do any research. He seemed job very, in a way, very uninterested. It's very casual.
Salman Rushdie
Very uninterested in knowing who it was that he'd decided to murder just because, I guess, he'd heard from people he was influenced by, that I was some kind of demonic figure. There is a very effective degree of demonization that has taken place across the islamic world in which there's a lot of people who grow up thinking that I am the kind of boogeyman. On the other hand, his own family were not like that. They were not fanatics. They were perfectly secularized american citizens.
So I don't know where he got it from. You decide not to go to try to interview your attacker. I think the core of the book, in some ways, the apogee of the book, is this imagined dialogue between the two of you and one thing you say to him in this imagined dialogue is, I know that it is possible to construct an image of a man, a second self, that bears very little resemblance to the first self. But the second self gains credibility because it is repeated over and over again until it begins to feel real, more real than the first self. And you imagine saying this to him almost as a way of helping him understand what he was doing.
Ezra Klein
You are creating his shadow self, right? You are creating a version of him that is now more real in the world than he is. I hope so. Tell me about that. Well, I included this anecdote about Samuel Beckett being the victim of a knife attack, and he almost died.
Salman Rushdie
And in his case, he actually did go to confront his attacker in court and said to him, why do you do it? And all the man was able to say was, I dont know, sir, im sorry. And I thought, thats useless. That doesnt get you anywhere. And I thought, even if I was permitted by his lawyer or whatever to have a meeting, I would get some banality.
I probably wouldnt get an apology because theres no indication of any remorse, but I would get some form of ideologue, sloganized answer, which wouldn't get me anywhere. It wouldn't answer for me, this hole in my understanding of him. But how can somebody with so little knowledge of a person agree to murder them? So I thought maybe the best way to do this is to use my skill, my skill of imagination and storytelling to try and get inside his head and at least create a character that I can believe might do something like this, whether it's his real character or not, actually become secondary. I want the fictional character.
Ezra Klein
I mean, I understand that as a storyteller, there's now a hole at the center of your story, right? A character who no longer made sense to you, even as he had become a central character. Was it therapeutic to make, I don't want to say him correctly motivated, but fleshed out enough that the story works? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't use the word therapeutic, but it was a way of taking control of the narrative. It was a way of saying, this is my narrative.
Salman Rushdie
I tell the story. I read the book, and we haven't spoken in detail about the rest of it, but the rest of it, I understood it as a very deep, intense assertion of the reality of your actual self. I mean, the book is physical and intimate, and in your rehabilitation and in your hospital stay and in the things that had to happen for you to stand and walk again in the moments you almost died, in the moments that medication turned on you and created terrible and often somewhat grotesque physical maladies. And there was a way in which you couldnt read the book without this deep confrontation with your life as you actually lived it. I mean, the book felt to me like a deep insistence that the Salman Rushdie who mattered was the one who actually lived through all this.
Well, I hope that people read it that way. So thank you. Because, for one thing, I rarely in my life felt so deeply physically connected to my body as I have in this last year and a half. It was such an incredibly physical thing that happened, both the attack and the recovery and the psychological ramifications of all of that. I thought, I have to get into this.
I can't actually present the story in a way that makes sense to people unless I reveal undress in public. And it felt a bit. I always think publishing a book is a little bit like undressing in public, but this one really is. The memoir form was more or less invented by Rousseau in his confessions. And ever since then, I've always thought the principle of the autobiographical memoir is, tell as much truth as possible.
If youre not going to tell the whole naked, unvarnished truth, dont write the book. There are the parts of the book that are literally like that, where you are undressed, youre being operated on, youre in a surgical room. And then there are the parts that actually felt more like that to me because they were so intensely vulnerable. And theres a dimension of the book, and you come back to it a few times, where you somewhat insist on your own life as a tragedy, admit a kind of defeat. And I wanted to talk about that, and I wanted to see, rather than having me read this, I wanted to have you read it.
Ezra Klein
It's from knife.
Salman Rushdie
The most upsetting thing about the attack is that it has turned me once again into somebody I have tried very hard not to be. For more than 30 years. I have refused to be defined by the fatwa and insisted on being seen as the author of my books. Five before the fatwa and 16 after it. I had just about managed it when the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about the attack on the satanic verses and its author.
And now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject. I think now I'll never be able to escape it. No matter what I've already written or may now write, I'll always be the guy who got knifed. The knife defines me. Ill fight a battle against that, but I suspect I will lose.
Yeah, I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. Yeah. I was going to ask if you still feel that way. Up to a point, I do, yes, because it took me so long to shake off the shadow of the fatwa itself in those years, and to have people begin to respond to my books just as books, whether they like them or not, in a way, doesnt matter. But that shadow wasn't hanging over people's response to my work.
And now here it is again. And truly, I don't know if whatever I write next will be read in the light of this attack or whether people will be able to read and judge and enjoy it on its own terms. This book, even that paragraph struck me as a different answer to the question than I think you've sort of admitted to giving. You've written a sort of autobiography before, a memoir called Joseph Anton, which you did in the third person. This book is in the first person, and it doesn't really seem to me this book is about being the writer of books.
Ezra Klein
This book is about being a person. Right. Like a person in a physical body who could die, who has a wife he loves, who has children. It just forced an understanding of you as a person. Yeah.
Salman Rushdie
I mean, it's a very bad reason for having to write a self portrait, but it is intended as a self portrait, and with, as I say, as much openness and undefendedness as I could manage. Did trying to write this self portrait, did it change your sense of yourself? Yeah, that's a good question. No, I think it just in some way clarified it.
One of the questions I ask myself in the book is, given that you've been by great good fortune and medical skill, given a second act that you weren't supposed to have, how are you going to use it? What will you do with that gift of time? And the reason why so much of the book is about love and family is because that's what's right at the front of my head now, in whatever time I have left, I hope it'll be a while. That's what I want to focus on, that and work and frankly, nothing else. I mean, I think, you know, look, this is the 22nd book.
If there aren't any more books, that's okay. There's a lot already. Probably nobody will ever read all 22, so theres enough of me out there on the shelves. I mean, I hope there are some more. But the priority now is to lead a life of loving and being loved.
Thats what I think this thing has taught me. I think thats a nice place to end. So then, always our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience? So I would recommend Don Quixote for many people, the first great masterpiece in the novel form, and for many people, the greatest.
Especially also because there's now a wonderful new translation of it by Edith Grossman, which makes it very accessible to english readers. Previous translations were, frankly, a little dull, but this one is fantastically vivid and alive. So that, yeah, I mean, I will have to say, because I think it's the greatest novel of the last, however long. 100 years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And please read the book rather than watch the Netflix version.
Garcia Marquez himself refused to allow the book to be filmed during his lifetime, and it's a great shame that his heirs have overruled that. But 100 years solitude is one of the most joyful books ever written. From the first sentence, you were plunged into this world of magic. And what would be the third? I mean, I think, you know, of the three great masters of the 20th century, Joyce, Proust and Kafka.
We live in Kafka's world, so I would probably say the trial or the castle or both of them. So that's four books. Salman Rushdie, thank you very much. Thank you.
Ezra Klein
This episode of the Ezra Klein show is produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland, who, Kristin Lin, and Aman Sahota.
We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Samielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rostrasser, and special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Rinalini Czakavourki.