‘I’m surprised we came through it so well’: Salman Rushdie and Rachel Eliza Griffiths on surviving assassination

Back in 1989, when Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa made The Satanic Verses the world’s most controversial novel and its author the most hunted man, “there were people who were willing to say that I wasn’t in that much danger and that I was dramatising it in order to draw attention to myself,” Salman Rushdie remembers. He pauses. “Nobody thinks that now.”

On 12 August 2022, Rushdie was being interviewed on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state when a young man he had never met leapt out of the audience with a knife and began stabbing him, over and over again: in the hand, the leg, the chest, the face. Thirty-three years after the fatwa, the assailant that Rushdie no longer expected or feared had finally come forward.

During the first few months of his recovery Rushdie feared he would never write again but he worked his way back to fiction by writing his 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. “The elephant in the room cliche is appropriate,” he says. His wife, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, told the story her own way in The Flower Bearers, intertwining the attack with the sudden loss of her friend Kamilah Aisha Moon the previous year.

While they were processing events on the page, the couple were also working with director Alex Gibney on a documentary called Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie. “Seeing is believing,” says Rushdie, a lifelong cinephile. “There are things words can do and there are things images can do.”

It’s appropriate, then, that we’re meeting in a screening room at the Soho Hotel. Fresh from New York, Rushdie’s home for the last 26 years, they’re a striking couple: he’s dapper, she’s glamorous. I last met Rushdie in 2019, to talk about his novel Quichotte. Apart from the black lens in his spectacles, which covers the space where his right eye used to be, he seems remarkably unchanged: calm, droll, precise, regal. He’s delighted to hear this.

“I’m not different,” he says with pride. “It’s hard to get through an entire life without having a moment or two when life asks you quite hard questions. And you don’t know how you’ll answer those questions until you’re obliged to respond. Many people discover that they have inner resources which they didn’t know they had. I think that about Eliza and I think that about myself. I’m surprised that we came through it so well. Tougher than we thought.”

“Looking back now, I’m proud of both of us,” Griffiths gently agrees. “We did the best we could do.”

On his fifth day in hospital, Rushdie decided that his recovery should be documented, if only for the couple themselves. Griffiths sent for her camera and her footage forms the backbone of Knife. Some scenes are hard to watch, like the lurid, horror-movie quality of Rushdie’s doomed eye. “It doesn’t look like eyes should look,” he says drily to me. “I looked much worse than I thought I did.” Griffiths made sure there were no mirrors during his 18 days in the trauma ward: “I thought if he saw himself as I was seeing him, it could impede his recovery. He might feel really hopeless.”

Equally upsetting are Griffiths’s anguished video diaries from the first few days, when there was no guarantee that Rushdie would survive. “I’ve been a photographer for 20 years so the camera is an extension of myself,” she says. “The things that I could never speak to Salman about, I could speak to the lens. It helped me process and survive everything that was happening.”

Ever since the couple had met and fallen in love at a literary event in 2017, they had avoided publicity. Most people didn’t even know they had got married in 2021. Now they were headline news. Griffiths was aware of two worlds: the one outside, where the attack was global news, and the tiny, desperate realm of the hospital room. “Unlike Salman’s family and friends, I had no muscle memory of what it meant to have all this attention,” she says. “I did have a sense that things were happening beyond that trauma ward but I had to dial the volume down on that. I thought if I focus on what’s happening out there, I can’t be present in here.”

Rushdie didn’t have his phone – it took him months to reply to the thousands of text messages he received – but he does remember Eliza’s brother-in-law sitting by his bedside and softly reading President Biden’s statement of support into his ear. “I was very touched. I thought, oh, it’s on that scale.” Unlike in 1989, when the likes of Roald Dahl, John Le Carré and Jimmy Carter were less than sympathetic to Rushdie’s plight, the solidarity was almost universal. “It’s because I actually got hurt,” he says simply. “That was the difference.”

It took a year of recovery before Rushdie was feeling well enough to view the footage and realised that it could grow into a film. The couple spoke to various directors but Gibney, whose four-hour documentary about Elon Musk is also released this autumn, asked the smartest questions. Gibney suggested taking inspiration from Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective, in which a man remembers his life from a hospital bed.

The film therefore takes a journey through Rushdie’s past: his childhood in Mumbai, his migration to Britain in 1961, his years as an advertising copywriter and aspiring novelist, his breakthrough triumph with 1981’s Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children, and the life-changing drama that followed The Satanic Verses. Even if you remember the period, the extremity of the hatred unleashed on “Satan Rushdie” is still shocking – the righteous conviction that a novel (which most of his ill-wishers had never read) should be punishable by death.

Rushdie was hesitant about that part of the film. “I thought, Really? We have to go back there again? It feels like ancient history. So I took some persuading. But it’s been so long that many people watching the film would have no context for why this man decided to jump up out of an audience and attack me. Even my friends were not aware of the weight of it, the scale of the attack in 1989, so I guess it’s worth telling people this is how it was.”

Born in 1978, Griffiths was just 10 when the fatwa happened and knew very little about it. Nor did the subject often come up during the first five years of their relationship. “Just in passing,” she says. “Salman would refer to it as the bad old days but it wasn’t a presence in our daily being together.” When I interviewed Rushdie in 2019, he brushed the topic aside: “Truthfully, it’s been so long now that I don’t think about it.” Was that true, I wonder now, or did he just not want to talk about it?

“No, I did truthfully feel that,” he says. “We live in an age when the subject changes very fast. The world was talking about many other things. I didn’t like to talk about it because I felt like I was being dragged back into a time which I felt I had managed to leave behind. And then, unfortunately, this one young man tried to drag me back into it.” He laughs mordantly. “It’s annoying.”

The attack was not just an injury to Rushdie’s body; it sliced through the life he had made for himself since 1989 and the freedom he had painstakingly reclaimed by no longer hiding. During his decade under police protection in Britain, when the intelligence services foiled six different assassination plots, he was the invisible man. But in New York, he was regularly photographed socialising with celebrities as a declaration of defiance: look, here I am in the swim of things, there’s nothing to fear. In 2017 he even spoofed himself in a Curb Your Enthusiasm plotline about Fatwa! The Musical. It was all over, until it wasn’t.

Knife opens with an impressionistic reenactment of the assault and climaxes with the real thing. The Chautauqua Institution films its events from multiple angles but the video from 12 August 2022 had been legally embargoed as prosecution evidence so the couple had never seen it until three days before the film’s premiere at the Sundance film festival in January. It is shocking enough for an outsider to watch the frenzy of violence descend on Rushdie. What must it have been like for him?

“Yeah, it wasn’t easy to watch,” Rushdie says. It was, though, strangely reassuring. “In my memory I just stood there and he attacked me. But in the film you can see me trying to get away.” Encouraging, too, was the sight of people rushing to his aid. “At that moment on that stage I was exposed to the worst of human behaviour and the best of human behaviour. The audience saved my life. Because he wasn’t planning to stop. Without them I wouldn’t be here. I saw great violence and great courage within seconds of each other.”

Griffiths wasn’t in Chautauqua on the day. She heard the news from worried friends. “You wish you could have been there and what could you have done?” she says. “I think the anger is the frustration that nothing could have been done. Nothing could have changed this.” So she set her anger aside (“‘Keep calm and carry on’ is kind of my personality”) and focused on the love and care her husband received. “I remain astonished by the kindness. I love seeing that about humanity after witnessing such violence and darkness from humanity.”

Rushdie was surprised to feel no rage towards his assailant. Did it hit him later? “Strangely not,” he says. “I think I felt that anger and vengeful feelings were a way of being trapped in the thing and in order to move forward you have to not carry that weight around.”

To that end, he chose not to think about his would-be killer, a 24-year-old Muslim from New Jersey called Hadi Matar. In the memoir, he refuses to even name him. “In my head, I dismissed him as not being important. I’m going on with my life, you’re in jail. That’s where we are.” Rushdie attended both trials but Matar never gave testimony, never said a word in his defence. He was a blank space. “I thought, ‘You’re really unimpressive. You’re a little squirt.’ I mean, a little squirt can almost kill you. There’s that, too.”

Rushdie has always wanted to be known as a writer rather than a victim or a symbol of free speech under fire. He published a short story collection, The Eleventh Hour, last year, with a novel on the way. Griffiths is writing, too. The film therefore feels like the end of a chapter.

“It’s part of your story, but it’s not the story,” Griffiths says. “You acknowledge it and honour it and then you keep on living and creating and doing the things you must do. By putting it all out there, we get to move on.” Rushdie chuckles: “I hope so. I mean, two books and a film is enough.”

People who come to the brink of death often report a period of psychedelically intense appreciation for life before settling back into normality, but Rushdie still feels, four years later, a sense of gratitude. “I did come away thinking I’d been given a second act,” he says. “The odds were against it. It does make me value the days very much. I wake up and think, ‘Still here. Not doing so badly.’”

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie is in UK and Irish cinemas now