‘No fires of hell, no heavenly choir’: Salman Rushdie on near death experience

Author Salman Rushdie is back in the spotlight for his new book ‘Knife: Meditation After an Attempted Murder'. In multiple interactions with the US media, the author has spoken at length about his memory of the knife attack during an event in New York in August 2022, which cost him his right eye. His latest book is based on the same incident. Rushdie also shared what he feels about his assailant who is currently in prison.

“I wanted to sit down with him and say why did you do it? Because there is to my mind a sort of absence in his story, which is that he's very young, he has no criminal record up to this point. He wasn't on any terrorism watchlist, and wasn't involved with fanatic groups. He was a young guy in New Jersey and to go from that to murder as a first step is very big,” Rushdie told CBC’s Nahlah Ayed.

“Murder is a very big crime and yet what he says about me in this somewhat unwise interview that he gave to the New York Post from jail. He said that he'd read two pages of something I'd written and I don't even know what he read. I mean the internet is full of garbage I don't even know if it's two pages I actually wrote. And he saw a couple of YouTube videos and that was his motivation.”

Rushdie, who was issued a fatwa back in 1989 by the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for his book The Satan Verses, suggested the knife attacker would not pass the muster as a character in a book. “If I was to write that as a fictional character, my editor would say to me that's not good enough, not convincing. So, there's this absence in the narrative.”

Rushdie said he expected to hear some kind of a ‘banality’ if he were to ask the attacker the reason for his actions. He cited the interaction between Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who had also been a victim of a knife attack, and his assailant.

“First, I thought I'd try to fill it [the absence in the story; the motivation behind the incident] in by actually asking him. But then one of the reasons I included the story [in his book Knife] about when Samuel Beckett was the victim of a knife attack. He (Beckett) in fact did go to court when his knife attacker was in court and he said to him ‘why do you do it?’ And the man simply said ‘I don't know, sir. I'm sorry’. That's useless isn't it, that doesn't help anybody understand anything. And then I thought probably if I was to have the opportunity of meeting him, I would get some other banality,” he said.

“I doubt that I would get remorse because there is no sign of remorse that I've seen. But I'd get some kind of cliched ideological sloganising.”

Rushdie said a lot of people in recent months had asked him if the near-death experience had turned him religious.

“You have no idea how many people have asked me in the last 20 months if as a result of the miracle of my survival, I've discovered religion. The answer is no. Because what I discovered was the miracle of science. The fact that this extraordinary job was done on my body not just to save my life but to leave me kind of functional, able to get up and walk around. A miracle created by human knowledge, not by any intervention. I don't believe that some divine hand reached down to protect me.”

“At that moment of near death, nothing miraculous happened. No pearly gates, no fires of hell no heavenly choir, no tunnel of light, no kind of sense of lifting out of the body none of that. In fact, it was the opposite. It was an intensely physical experience. I'd rarely felt so much in my body you know as in that moment when I thought it was about to expire. Religion didn't show up.”

The author said that when it came to free speech the older generation used to be more conservative but now it’s the other way round.

“I feel kind of disappointed in the younger generation because it used to be that it was kind of old fogies like me who were conservative about what could be said and what was wrong to say. And young people were iconoclastic and you know let it all hang out. Now it's the other way around. It's the older generation that still holds on to traditional ideas of free expression.”

He said the trend was alarming. “The fact that there's a generation growing up that is willing to suppress speech which it doesn't like is extremely alarming. Because, I mean the simple definition of free speech in order for it to be free, it has to include speech by people you don't agree with. Otherwise [it’s] not free speech. There's an increasing feeling that that's a kind of wrong way of thinking and that it's better to suppress improper speech.”

Rushdie was attacked on August 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York, United States. The attacker was identified as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from New Jersey.