Ever since the February day in 1989 that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic
Verses, “blasphemous against Islam,” I have pulled for Salman Rushdie. I confess to having read none of his books and knew little of his politics, but this Indian-American author struck me as the ultimate embodiment of man’s fight for freedom.
And then—sigh!—I read his new memoir, Knife. The “knife” in the title refers to the weapon used by a young New Jersey Muslim named Hadi Matar. Matar stabbed Rushdie very nearly to death on the amphitheater stage of the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022. The stabbing was inconvenient. Had Rushdie been shot, ideally by a guy in a MAGA hat, the shooting would have justified his anxiety about America’s “insane gun violence and equally insane Trump and Trumpublicans.”
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