Salman Rushdie Was Targeted by Unreason. Religion Can Offer Better.

On August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday in upstate New York, prominent author Salman Rushdie was brutally attacked for a novel that he had published some 34 years prior. He was a guest speaker at the Chautauqua Institution, where “silver-haired liberal-minded folks gathered in idyllic community,” in his words, and no one expected any disturbance. But in the audience, there was also a 24-year-old would-be assassin who was hiding a sharp knife to butcher the 75-year-old author. 

“Why now? Really? It’s been so long.” This is what Rushdie thought, in just a second, when he saw the man running toward him, as he recalls in his book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, published this past spring. Why now, he wondered, because the controversy over his infamous book, The Satanic Verses, had long calmed down. The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s infamous 1989 “death fatwa” on its author was long forgotten. The Indian-born and British-raised author had settled in New York City, was enjoying a virtually normal life, and showed up in public places without much concern. To Chautauqua, too, he had come with no special security, despite a bad dream he had a few days prior which felt like a “premonition.” 

However, some people were apparently still grinding their axes against Rushdie. One of them was his would-be assassin, who goes on trial for his failed assassination attempt Monday in New York. In Knife, Rushdie never fully names the man, calling him instead “the A.” Reportedly, he was born in California with Lebanese origins, and was “sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps causes.” The latter, it seems, included punishing Rushdie for his blasphemy against Islam, even after all these years. 

Knife opens with the details of the gruesome attack. While Rushdie was about to give a talk about the United States as a haven for exiled writers, the attacker jumped on the stage and grabbed him, stabbing him 15 times in 27 seconds, before some brave people around were able to stop him. It is almost a miracle that Rushdie survived, despite suffering deep wounds and losing his right eye. As a doctor told him later, he was a bit lucky, for “the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”

In perhaps the book’s most interesting chapter, Rushdie conducts an imaginary interview with “the A.,” tries to get into his mind, and envisions what he would say. We get a picture of the man as an “incel,” one sitting in his mother’s basement and online gaming until being radicalized by the preachings of “Imam Yutubi”—an imaginary name Rushdie seems to have coined as an allusion to the popular media platform.  

In this imaginary conversation, Rushdie asks “the A.” the why question: “You were only twenty-four-years old. Your whole life ahead of you. Why were you so ready to ruin it. Your life. Not mine.”

In return, the attacker finds the answer in the afterlife: “This life, here in this world, is unimportant. It is only a waiting room … [until] we will have the eternal life … When you are burning in hellfire, I will be in the perfumed garden.”

This imaginary conversation reminded me of an argument long proposed by outspoken atheists: that religion, especially when it promises salvation after death, is a recipe for violence. “Promise a young man that death is not the end,” as Richard Dawkins put it, right after 9/11, “and he will willingly cause disaster.”

As a Muslim who also believes in the afterlife, I see some truth in this argument: The belief in eternal salvation can indeed help people, including militant Islamists, easily sacrifice themselves to a violent cause. However, the same belief can also encourage harmless piety and moral behavior, as it does to a much larger number of believers. It really depends on what people think God will reward in the afterlife: peace and forgiveness, or aggression and revenge? Both options exist, both in Islam and most other religions.  

Modern history also shows that one does not need religious belief in the afterlife to die for a sacred cause. From the Kamikaze pilots to the Tamil Tigers—the very inventors of suicide bombing—countless numbers of nationalists, fascists, communists, and other collectivists have given their lives willingly for the glory of the nation, the party, or the revolution. They sought heaven not in the religious afterlife, but in this very secular life, which should help us see that “the problem” is not religion but fanaticism of any kind. 

Most of Knife is a readable and affecting story of how Rushdie was suddenly attacked, how he barely survived, and how he began to recover. He narrates his life and reflects on family, his wife Eliza, his sons Zafar and Milan—and how the death threats he has received over the years have been hard for all. For those who saw Rushdie only as the brave or offensive author of The Satanic Verses, the book is quite helpful in getting introduced to Rushdie the man.

As for Rushdie the thinker, many ideas in the book double-down on a rather critical view of religion, which Rushdie calls “an ancient form of unreason.” No wonder he feels an affinity with “the French Enlightenment” for which “the battle for freedom was not so much the State as the Church.” He also praises the founders of India for “removing religion from the public sphere.” “I have no issue with religion,” he adds, when it is “the private faith of anyone.” When religion moves out of this “private space,” however, it becomes a problem because it imposes “values on others.” 

Rushdie could be well excused to have such skeptical views on religion. He’s experienced the worst forms of it. It was indeed religious “unreason” and “imposition” that threatened his life for decades and finally came close to murdering him. But is there no middle ground between those two alternatives? 

The late great Father Richard Neuhaus, who founded the religious journal First Things,  had believed in this third way and conceptualized it nicely. On the one hand, he noted, there are secularists who seek a “naked public square”—the one preferred by staunch French secularists or communist regimes. On the other hand, there is the “sacred public square”—the one preferred by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Taliban, and perhaps even some American postliberals. But there is a third and better option: the “civil public square,” where all worldviews can freely express themselves without turning oppressive. 

Now, some people could say that not all religions are the same, or that a civil public square is impossible with Islam, which is inherently hegemonic. Some of them—the Islamists—would say this with pride. Others—Islamosceptics—with concern. But there also is a tradition of Islamic liberalism, which offers an interpretation of Islam that does not dominate the public square but claims a voice in it, through civil society or democratic politics, without using any violence and compulsion. Scholars such Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im or Andrew March have demonstrated how such a synthesis of Islam and liberalism can work in Muslim-majority or minority contexts.

How would this Islamic liberalism address the burning issue of blasphemy? As I’ve explained before, Muslim views on this issue can be roughly divided into three categories. One is the extremist stance (that targeted Rushdie), which holds that blasphemy against Islam and its Prophet should be brutally punished everywhere and by any means, including terrorism and mob violence. The other is the conservative stance (that is mainstream), which holds that insulting Islam is indeed a grave crime, but one that can be punished only by proper courts with due process. The third is the liberal-reformist stance (that I espouse) which argues that Muslims can disapprove, criticize, or boycott offensive words, but also that they should show patience and restraint, as the Quran seems to really advise.

Had the Muslim reaction against Rushdie’s 1988 book been mainly on the liberal-reformist lines, it would have been much better for all. Luckily, this lesson seems to have been taken by some Muslims, especially in the West, as seen in the peaceful responses to Quran-burning incidents in Sweden in 2023. Free speech advocates in the West would be wise to see such nuances and prospects in the Muslim world, instead of assuming an irreconcilable conflict between freedom and Islam. Moreover, as I’ve written before, we should come to see that we don’t have to choose between religion and the Enlightenment.

As for Rushdie, I should concede that I am among the many Muslims who detested his unsavory depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and his wives in The Satanic Verses—just like there were many Christians who detested the unsavory depiction of the Last Supper at the opening ceremony of Paris Olympics earlier this summer. But there’s not a doubt in my mind that Rushdie did not deserve to be threatened for decades and ultimately suffer the horrific attack he vividly describes in Knife. I wish him and his family a safer future.

Meanwhile, I hope that all forces of unreason, believing and unbelieving alike, do not deprive us of that core value with which Rushdie’s story came to be associated: freedom of speech. Let’s just not forget that freedom, in all its aspects, has a better chance to flourish when its defenders are not only secular but also religious.