Moments after a knife-wielding audience member charged the stage where acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie was giving a talk on safety for writers in August 2022, Rushdie found himself lying in a pool of his own blood. He had been stabbed at least 12 times.
Rushdie had reasons to anticipate a violent attack: He received a death sentence from Iran in 1989 over one of his controversial novels, The Satanic Verses. But still, he said in an interview with NPR, he believed enough time had passed that he let his guard down. When he saw the man in the audience who would soon be his assailant run onto the stage, he said, “it felt like he was a time traveler, somebody emerging out of the past who I had for a long time been wondering if I would actually get to see. But then he showed up.”
Now, over a year and a half later, Rushdie is back under a public spotlight. On Tuesday, the novelist released his highly anticipated memoir of the attack, called Knife, and conducted his first major TV interview, with 60 Minutes, which was released on Monday.
In the interview, Rushdie spoke on how divisive and dangerous book bans, which surged at the end of 2023, are becoming. “In America today, this is a bad moment for free expression, because the censorship is coming from so many different directions,” he told 60 Minutes, adding “there’s a movement from the left and a movement from the right,” and “the first groups that suffer from that are minority groups.”
‘Professional assassins’
Rushdie’s career as a writer and author speaks to how banning books can go horribly wrong. The publication of his fourth novel—The Satanic Verses, a controversial magical realism novel inspired by the life of Islamic prophet Muhammad—ignited accusations of blasphemy from Islamist groups in India and Pakistan in 1988, according to a biography by the British Council. In 1999, the accusations led the former leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling on “all Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill Rushdie, along with editors, publishers, and translators in connection with the book, “so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.”
“It was very dangerous because the Iranian state itself was trying to carry out the threat,” Rushdie said in the interview, adding that “these were professional assassins.” He went into hiding in the U.K., where he has citizenship, and received 24-hour protection from the British government and police.
Around 2000, Rushdie moved to New York, and spent years doing hundreds of literary events and book tours. And then came the attack in 2022, which lasted just 27 seconds but left Rushdie severely injured. All the tendons and most of the nerves in his left hand were severed, and his right eye is permanently unusable. The suspected perpetrator, 24-year-old Hadi Matar, is under arrest and awaiting trial, where he’s expected to plead not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and assault in connection with the attack.
In Rushdie’s view, this kind of violence can be prevented. “There is value in hearing from voices that offend us,” he said, because it’s a pivotal way to challenge each others’ perceptions and stereotypes of others. Someone doesn’t need to ban a book they find offensive, he argues, because there is a much simpler fix: “Just shut it.”
“At that point it loses its ability to offend you,” he said, adding that “if you read a 400- or 500-page book in order to be offended by it, you’re doing a lot of work to be offended.”
But the number of people taking offense, and taking action through bans, is rising. In the U.S., from July to December of last year, 4,349 instances of book bans were recorded across 23 states and 52 public school districts, according to a report by PEN America, a free expression advocacy group. More books were banned in those six months than in the entire 2022 school year. The majority of the bans took place in Florida, with 3,135 bans across 11 school districts in the state.
The bans seem to be driven by a vocal minority, the report states, citing a 2022 poll conducted by the American Library Association that found over 70% of parents oppose book banning. In a school district in Wisconsin, one parent’s concerns spearheaded a temporary banning of 444 books. According to a list of banned books by PEN America, the most banned book of the 2022 school year was Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe, with 15 bans; it was also the most banned book of the last school year. Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, and Rupi Kaur’s poetry book Milk and Honey are all also on the list, reflecting a theme of bans on books about and authored by women, people of color, or those who are queer.
