‘So it’s you. Here You Are’: Salman Rushdie Reveals He Thought Fatwa From Iran Was Carried Out When Knife Attacker Launched Frenzied Attack At New York Book Fair Two Years Ago

Salman Rushdie has revealed he believed the fatal fatwa from Iran was carried out when he was attacked with a knife at a book fair in New York.

The 76-year-old author thought he was going to die during the on-stage assassination attempt at the literary festival on August 12, 2022.

Rushdie lost the sight of his right eye in the brutal 27-second assault that also left him with stab wounds to his face, neck, chest, stomach, thigh and hand.

The publication of his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, received heavy criticism for the proposed contradiction of the infallibility of the Prophet Muhammad and was banned in a number of countries.

Then in 1989, the then supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared a $3 million fatwa on his life for the ‘blasphemy’ contained in the book, sending the author into hiding for 10 years.

Now Mr Rushdie explained that his ‘first thought’ when he saw the would-be assassin approaching him was: ‘So it’s you. Here you are’.

He also said the attack still ‘troubles me every day’ as he prepares to see his account of it published in ‘Knife’, his 22nd book, on Tuesday.

He said: ‘I confess that I have sometimes imagined my assassin standing up in some public forum and coming after me like this,’ he wrote.

“So my first thought when I saw this murderous form hurtling towards me was, “So it’s you. Here you are”.’

Before the 2022 knife attack, Mr Rushdie’s police officers warned him of half a dozen serious assassination attempts by state-sponsored terrorists before Iran called off its attempts in 1998.

But the fatwa remains in place and a lone wolf almost claimed the prize after Rushdie accepted an invitation to speak at the Chautauqua Amphitheater in August 2022.

He almost pulled out after having a dream two nights earlier where he was violently attacked.

Perhaps unconsciously spurred on by the venue’s name, he dreamed he was in a Roman gladiatorial arena.

“It was just somebody with a spear sticking down and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him,” he told CBS.

The dream was so vivid that he thrashed around in his bed trying to escape, waking his wife, the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who had to alternately wake him and calm him down.

‘I was quite shaken by it,’ he told the BBC, ‘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 don’t want to allow your life to be controlled by something that happened in a dream. And then I thought, I’m going. It’s a concert.’

He brushed aside his fears but discovered there was no safety when he took to the stage to give a lecture on the importance of protecting writers whose lives are threatened.

‘Out of the corner of my right eye – the last my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running towards me down the right side of the seating area,’ he writes in his book.

But he didn’t see the knife and at first thought he had just been hit.

“I think he was absolutely crazy, you know, he was flailing around,” Rushdie said.

But then he saw a pool of blood ‘spreading out from my body’ and realized that his right eye was ‘sort of hanging out of my face, sitting on my cheek, I’ve said like a soft-boiled egg. And blind’.

‘I remember thinking I was probably going to die. And it was interesting because it was quite matter-of-fact. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like I was afraid of it or anything’.

It took 27 seconds before the festival staff managed to pull the attacker off the then 75-year-old.

Sir. Rushdie said: ‘It’s quite a long time. It’s that extraordinary half-minute of intimacy, you know, where life meets death.’

The author was airlifted to hospital, where he underwent eight hours of emergency surgery before being put on a ventilator, unable to speak.

He said he felt a ‘deep sense of loneliness’ at the prospect of dying away from his family, but recovered because ‘Part of me, some struggling part deep down simply had no plan to die’.

After 18 days in hospital and three weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie was discharged.

One of his surgeons told him that he was both really unlucky and really lucky.

‘I said, “What’s the lucky part?” And he said, “Well, the lucky thing is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” Rushdie said.

His alleged attacker, Hadi Matar, 24, was dragged off the stage by stewards and is being held without bail in the Chautauqua County Jail pending trial.

Born in California to Lebanese parents, he was found with a fake driver’s license in the name of two Hezbollah commanders when he was seized and admitted he had read only two pages of the book, which had angered the Iranian clerics.

Rushdie is likely to see Matar again in person when he eventually goes on trial, but has refused to name him in his new book.

‘He and I had 27 seconds together, you know? That’s it,’ Rushdie told 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.

“I don’t need to give him any more of my time.”

The author has always fought against being defined by the attempts on his life and was reluctant to turn his pen to the attack that nearly killed him until he decided it might help him come to terms with it.

“I have to focus on, you know, to use the cliché, the elephant in the room,” he said.

And the moment I thought that, something changed in my head. And it became a book that I really wanted to write.

‘I mean, language is a way of opening up the world. I have no other weapons.’

And he said he realized his slowly growing confidence in an ability to lead a normal life had been a mistake.

‘That time warp feeling, you know, of being drawn into a narrative that I thought was finished and then it turned out not to be.

‘I think that shadow is just there and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not.

‘I hope this is just a final twist in that story. I do not know. I’ll let you know.’