Salman Rushdie: Knife author dreamt about being stabbed just days before the attack

Thrashing around in a baying Roman colosseum frantically avoiding a man wielding a spear stabbing downwards, Sir Salman Rushdie recalls the vivid dream he had just days before the attack that nearly claimed his life two years ago.

So vivid was the dream, his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, woke him and reassured him he was safe in his bed.

“I was quite shaken by it – and I said to Eliza, I don’t want to go. And then you wake up a bit more, and you think, it’s just a dream, and you’re not going to allow your life to be ruled by something that happened in a dream.

“And so I thought, ‘I’ll go. It’s a gig. Fifteen hundred people had bought tickets. I can’t just not show up because I had a bad dream,” he told The Telegraph.

The acclaimed author, 76, was stabbed “13 or 14 times” in August 2022 while preparing to deliver a lecture on free speech at the Chautauqua Institution in New York.

The attack kept Rushdie in the hospital for six weeks and blinded him in one eye. A 26-year-old New Jersey resident, Hadi Matar, was charged with stabbing him. The vicious on stage assault came three decades after the notorious 1989 fatwa issued by Iran’s chief cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, condemning him to death after the release ofThe Satanic Verses.

Following the fatwa, Rushdie spent ten years in hiding, and in the years before the attack, still often required an armed guard while travelling.

Rushdie’s forthcoming memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder focuses on the attack, which came on 12 August 2022 with “this murderous shape rushing towards me”.

“I remember thinking I was dying,” he told the BBC in an interview. “Fortunately, I was wrong”.

Rushdie, who was knighted in 2007 for services to literature, remembered Matar “sprinting up the stairs,” and that after the attack, which lasted 27 seconds, he fell to the floor with “a spectacular quantity of blood” around him.

The attack damaged Rushdie’s liver, hands, and severed nerves in his right eye. He recalled that his eye was “kind of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I’ve said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind”.

The author said while he considers himself lucky to have avoided brain damage, it “upsets me every day,” and described how he now has to take greater care when walking down stairs, crossing the road, or performing a simple task like pouring water into a glass.

Rushdie recalled while he lay in a pool of his blood he was “idiotically thinking” about his Ralph Lauren suit, and that his keys and credit cards might fall out of his pocket.

“At the time of course, it’s ludicrous. But in retrospect, what it says to me, is there was some bit of me that was not intending to die. There was some bit of me that was saying, ‘I’m going to need those house keys, and I’m going to need those credit cards’”.

Matar has been held without bail since the attack, and said to officials previously, “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems”.

Matar’s trial, which was supposed to begin in January, has been put on hold after his attorneys argued they needed to review Rushdie’s memoir, since it could be evidence.

In Knife, Rushdie addresses Matar, saying, “Our lives touched each other for an instant and then separated. Mine has improved since that day, by yours has deteriorated. You made a bad gamble. I was the one with the luck”.

Rushdie also sat down with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, saying that the US is facing a “bad moment” for free speech.

“It used to be the case that very conservative voices were the places from which you would hear that such and such books should be banned or is obscene or disgusting or whatever,” Rushdie said in the interview.

Rushdie calls his memoir “at least as much a love story” as it is a story of a horrifying assault.

“There were two forces in collision here. One was a force of violence, fanaticism, bigotry, and the other was the force of love,” he said.

“And of course, the force of love is embodied in the figure of my wife Eliza”.

“And in the end, the way I understand what happened is that the force of love proved to be stronger than the forces of hatred”.