Writer: Salman Rushdie
Director: Alex Gibney
The auditorium at the Chautauqua Institute in New York State, where Salman Rushdie was about to deliver a lecture on 12 August 2022, looks half-empty when viewed in the CCTV camera footage used at the start of Alex Gibney’s explicit documentary. Its municipal-coloured walls and seats seem to be a drab setting for an assassination attempt. But instead of showing us shocking images from the camera and the many mobile phone videos taken by the audience, Gibney provides the viewer with a reconstruction similar to video game cutaways. It seems a little cheap, but it comes as a relief. However, Gibney shows the full horror at the end of the film, and the violence is indelible.
The author of The Satanic Verses was stabbed in the hand, in the stomach and, most brutally, in the right eye. When the bandage covering his eye is removed, it’s hard not to be viscerally moved by the image. His assailant, his would-be assassin, was 24-year-old Hadi Matar, not even born when the fatwa was announced by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie won’t say his assassin’s name out loud; instead, calls him an ass, or A for short. Rushdie’s wife, the poet, author and photographer, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, understandably enraged, calls Matar “illiterate” as if that’s the worst of his crimes.
In Knife, we learn little of Matar’s background or, indeed, his motivations for launching such an attack on Rushdie, long after the fatwa was withdrawn. Gibney’s film focuses on the author’s recovery from his injuries, the long stays in hospital and the physiotherapy. As the days pass, we see photos, archival news and television interviews tracing Rushdie’s childhood in India, his school days at Rugby, his time at Cambridge University and his early success as a writer.
Not much is made of Midnight’s Children, the novel that won the Booker Prize in 1981 and which propelled Rushdie to celebrity status. Shame is not mentioned at all. The majority of the footage centres on the publication of The Satanic Verses, the riots that succeeded it, the book burnings and the effigies set alight at protests. Chillingly and in ways that wouldn’t be permitted today, we hear from ordinary people saying that they would kill Rushdie if they saw him in the street. Across the world, bookshops are set on fire, and in Japan the novel’s translator is murdered; the Italian translator is critically injured in a knife attack.
As the narrator, Rushdie voices his doubts about whether the Ayatollah even read his book. Indeed, he wonders if anyone read the novel at all, especially after he heard about the Page 15 Club: as far as some people got before they surrendered to the struggle of reportedly dense and surreal prose. However, little of his sharp intellectualism comes across in Knife. Sitting up in his hospital bed, his battle is no longer with words and ideas, but with life-changing injuries. He looks small in his bed, and wife Griffiths, who was behind most of the cinematography in the film, talks to him as if he were a sick child. In hospital, Rushdie is no longer a champion of free speech, and neither is he the blasphemer that so many believed him to be. Instead, he is a human being, like us all, albeit fighting for his life.
Based on Rushdie’s 2024 memoir, Knife: Mediations After Attempted Murder, Gibney’s film is an intriguing documentary that never becomes a hagiography. It’s ugly, too- not just his scars and stitches, but the vehemence of those who wanted him killed or for his book to be banned. Germaine Greer initially refused to sign a petition in support of Rushdie, saying that the book ‘was about his own troubles.’ We see an interview with Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam in which he appears to support the fatwa. The footage fades out to Stevens singing Moonshadow with the prophetic lyrics “If I ever lose my eyes.”
However, the ugliest part of Knife comes at the end, when we see what happened on that stage in Chautauqua. Salman Rushdie certainly won’t forget it, and nor should we.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie will be in cinemas from 2 October.
