Salman Rushdie refuses to be 'diverted' by terrorism after surviving near-fatal stabbing attack
It’s been over three years since the stabbing that nearly took Salman Rushdie’s life, and the celebrated author is now sharing his story through a new lens.
At the Sundance Film Festival, Rushdie stepped into the spotlight for the premiere of "Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie," about the stabbing attack that nearly killed him in 2022.
"The reason for doing it is that I felt it wasn’t just about me, that there were principles at stake, and that actually maybe people should see what a terrorist attack looks like up close," Rushdie, 78, told The Wrap during the Sundance Film Festival.
Rushdie, who lost sight in one eye and suffered lasting damage to his hand in the 2022 attack, said he made a conscious decision not to allow the violence to alter his work as a writer.
"I told myself to go on being the writer I’d always been," he said.
"Not to write frightened books, and not to write revenge books. Just go on writing the books I had begun to write. To go on down the road I was on, and that was very much an act of will. I really thought, ‘I’m not going to be diverted in either direction, either the direction of cowardice or anger.’"
Reflecting on the three years since the attack, Rushdie admitted to a sense of deep unease regarding the current global climate.
He described the rise of radicalism, offering a blunt assessment of the modern world: "Everybody's gone crazy right now."
"It’s very hard to have a serious conversation," he told TheWrap.
The author, whose 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses" evoked worldwide protests and Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei to call for his death, said that his near-death experience revealed both humanity's cruelty and courage.
"I experienced, almost simultaneously, the worst side of human nature — violence led by ignorance, induced by the irresponsible — and on the other hand, the best side of human nature, because the first people who saved my life were the audience," he
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Rushdie was stabbed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Aug. 2022 before he was slated to give a lecture. Emergency responders airlifted him to a hospital in northwestern Pennsylvania, and he underwent surgery.
He suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, ultimately losing function of the injured eye. The attacker, Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced in May 2025 to 25 years in prison, the maximum possible term.
Rushdie described the 27-second attack as something that dragged him back in time.
"I saw the man in black running towards me, down the right-hand side of the seating area: Black clothes, black face mask – he was coming in hard and low, a squat missile," Rushdie told "60 Minutes" host Anderson Cooper in April 2024. "I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in this way."
"My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So, it’s you. Here you are," Rushdie said. "It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time … back into that distant past in order to kill me."
Despite the injuries and lasting trauma, Rushdie said that he would be continuing his work rather than retreating.
"I’ve always thought that it’s weird that dictators and tyrants are so frightened by writers and poets," he said.
"Why was (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco frightened of (Federico Garcia) Lorca? Why was Caesar Augustus frightened of Ovid? We’ve got no guns. We have no armies. But what we do is we argue with their ability to control the narrative. That’s what dictators want to do. They want to control the narrative. And writers and artists and journalists contest that, and that makes them dangerous."