“And if I ever think of you in the future, it will be with a dismissive shrug of the shoulders. I don’t forgive you, but I don’t withhold my forgiveness from you either. You are simply too insignificant to me.”
In his recently published book “Knife”, the Indian-American writer Salman Rushdie tries to classify what happened on August 12, 2022 in an educational center in Chautauqua, New York: During a discussion, 24-year-old Hadi Matar ran into the then 75-year-old year-old and stabbed him around 15 times. Rushdie was so badly injured that he struggled with death for days. He lost his eyesight and the stitches injured several organs, his left hand and his face.
Rushdie’s world “exploded,” he writes. In 1989, Iran’s revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death by fatwa because of the book “Satanic Verses.” Nothing had happened for 30 years, and now a man who hadn’t read two pages of the book attacked him. According to Rushdie, his victory was life, the meaning that the attack gave him, his defeat: now he is once again only defined by the fatwa.
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Image: APA/AFP/HANDOUT
Source: Nachrichten
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
