Alex Gibney’s documentary Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie tells the terrifying, inspiring story of how the author survived and thrived after the assassination attempt on him in New York in 2022. Based on Rushdie’s own memoir, the film is narrated extensively by the author himself and uses intimate hospital-bedside video footage shot by his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. It contains stomach-turningly explicit shots of Rushdie’s damaged eye and, finally, horrendous scenes of the attack itself.
Rushdie’s courage and calm voice
What emerges from the film is Rushdie’s courage and his remarkably level-headed, calm and unafraid writerly voice insisting on the primacy of literature, freedom of expression and the life of the imagination. The film takes viewers from Rushdie’s childhood in Mumbai (which he still calls “Bombay”), through years of bullying and unhappiness at an English public school, then Cambridge, London, and his day job in advertising, where he was cheerfully delighted by his successful campaign for Aero chocolate.
It then covers his writing fiction and the big breakthrough with his magic-realist creation myth Midnight’s Children. Much footage shows him in black-tie at awards, which is how he appeared in the media; a crude jihadi placard actually shows him in a bow tie.
The fatwah and its aftermath
The 1989 fatwah for The Satanic Verses was a shocking event—a death threat by a foreign power on a British national. Rushdie offers his theory that his book was seized upon by the Iranian theocracy as a diversionary tactic after the wearisome war with Iraq. In a sense, it was part of the prehistory of the modern culture wars and cancellation, but at a time when literary authors had more prestige than they have now.
Many British and American cultural figures, to their shame, airily sided against him at the time, and even in 2022 it was depressing to see how many declined to offer their unambiguous support. Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said emerge with distinction here for defending him.
Life after the attack
The film takes viewers through the years of internal exile, under guard by special branch in safe houses, then after a decade an emergence into public life—a defiant amplification of normality in his adopted city of New York. Eventually Rushdie had let his guard down sufficiently for his would-be murderous attacker to make his move.
Considerations of privacy mean that the film can’t or won’t go into much detail about the author’s private life, though there is something a little airily detached about his phrase: “There were marriages, divorce, children …” He doesn’t mention claiming to have embraced Islam in 1990, reportedly terrified by threats to his children, in an attempt to appease the extremists, a statement he later retracted.
Rather amazingly, Rushdie has recovered so much that his deportment does not seem to be that of an old or injured man—just that of the stately figure he always was. He visits the outside of the prison where his assailant is detained and goes back to the scene of the crime. Doubtless he has revised his security precautions—and no one would begrudge him this cautious victory dance. Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is in UK cinemas from 2 October.
