Salman Rushdie has revealed he was shaken by a “premonition” of being stabbed by a Roman gladiator, just two days before the knife attack that almost killed him.
The author of Satanic Verses said he thought he was going to die when speaking for the first time about the attempted murder on the stage of a New York literary festival that cost him an eye and stab wounds to the face, neck, chest, abdomen, thigh and hand.
He said the attack two years ago still “bothers me every day” as he prepares to see his account published in “Knife,” his 22nd book, on Tuesday.
“I confess that at times I had imagined my killer rising up in some public forum and coming for me in precisely this way,” he wrote.
‘So the first thing I thought when I saw this murderous form running towards me was: ‘So it’s you.’ Here you are’.’
Salman Rushdie described how his attacker slit his throat during the assassination attempt that cost him an eye and nearly killed him in August 2022.
It took festival-goers and staff 27 seconds to pull the attacker away from Rushdie.
The author spent eight hours in surgery, 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehabilitation after being flown to the hospital from New York’s Chautauqua Amphitheater.
‘I remember thinking I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was a real event,” Rushdie said.
The Indian-born author spent ten years in hiding after Iran imposed a $3 million fatwa on his life for the “blasphemy” contained in his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses.
His police guards alerted him to half a dozen serious assassination attempts by state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off their attempts in 1998.
But the fatwa remains in effect and a lone wolf came close to claiming the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.
He was about to retire after having dreamed two nights before in which he was being violently attacked.
Perhaps unconsciously prompted by the name of the place, he found himself dreaming that he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena.
“It was just someone with a spear stabbing me down, and I was rolling on the ground trying to get away from him,” he told CBS.
The dream was so vivid that he writhed in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to wake him up in turn and calm him down.
“I was quite shaken,” he told the BBC, “and I said to Eliza: I don’t want to go.”
‘And then you wake up some more and think it’s just a dream and you’re not going to let your life be governed by something that happened in a dream.
‘And then I thought, I’ll go. It is a concert.
He put his fears aside, but discovered there was no security when he took the stage to give a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are threatened.
“Out of the corner of my right eye (the last thing my right eye would see) I saw the man in black running toward me on the right side of the seating area,” he writes in his book.
But he didn’t see the knife and at first thought he had just been punched.
“I think he was just wildly, you know, flailing around,” Rushdie said.
The Indian-born author had a $3 million fatwa imposed on his head and endured at least six state-sponsored assassination attempts after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.
The book sparked protests around the world among Muslims outraged by its alleged “blasphemy.”
But then he saw a pool of blood “spreading from my body” and realized that his right eye was “like hanging off my face, sitting on my cheek, I said like a soft-boiled egg.” And blind’.
‘I remember thinking I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was a fact.
“It wasn’t, it wasn’t like I was terrified of it or anything.”
Rushdie’s account of the attack to be published by Penguin Random House
It took 27 seconds before festival staff managed to remove the attacker from the then 75-year-old man.
“That’s quite a long time,” Rushdie said.
“That’s the extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, where life meets death.”
The author was airlifted to hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery for eight hours before being placed on a ventilator, unable to speak.
He said he felt a “deep sense of loneliness” at the prospect of dying away from his family, but recovered. because “a part of me, a part that fights deep within me, simply had no plan to die.”
After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged.
One of his surgeons told him that he was very unlucky and very 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 said.
His attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, was dragged off stage by hostesses and remains held without bail in the Chautauqua County Jail while awaiting trial.
Born in California to Lebanese parents, when he was arrested he was found to have a fake driver’s license in the name of two Hezbollah commanders, admitting that he had only read two pages of the book that had so outraged Iranian clerics.
Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he finally comes to trial, but has refused to name him in his new book.
‘He and I spent 27 seconds together, you know? That’s it,” Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.
“I don’t need to spend any more time on it.”
The author has always struggled with being defined by the attempts on his life and was reluctant to devote his pen to the attack that nearly killed him until he decided it could help him come to terms with it.
“I need to focus, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,” he said.
‘And the moment I thought that, something changed in my head. And then it became a book that I really wanted to write.
‘I mean, language is a way of opening up the world. I have no other weapons.’
His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, admitted to having read only two pages of the book that had so outraged Iranian clerics.
Hadi Matar, 25, returned from four weeks in Lebanon a religious bigot, his mother told Dailymail.com.
Author Salman Rushdie has described his 256-page memoir as “a way of coming to terms with what happened and responding to violence with art” following the August 2022 attack.
And he said he realized that his growing confidence in his ability to lead a normal life had been a mistake.
“That feeling of time travel, you know, of being dragged into a narrative that I thought had concluded, and then it turned out not to.
‘I think that shadow is just there, and some days it’s dark and other days it’s not.
‘I hope this is just the last bit of that story.
‘I don’t know. I’ll make it know.’