Sir Salman ignored premonition he’d be stabbed during talk
SATANIC Verses author Sir Salman Rushdie did not want to go to the event where he was stabbed in the face after dreaming about the attack.
He suffered life-changing injuries in the 2022 horror in the US, including the loss of his right eye.
Sir Salman was set upon by a knifeman while preparing to deliver a talk on free speech in upstate New York.
In his first major television interview since the incident, the writer, 76, told Anderson Cooper on CBS show 60 minutes that he had dreamt of a man bearing down on him with a spear in an “amphitheatre” in the days before the event.
“I woke up and I was quite shaken,” he said. “I said to my wife, Eliza, ‘You know I don’t want to go’. Because of the dream. And then I thought, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s a dream’.”
Sir Salman also revealed he had a cancer scare not long after he was stabbed. In his new book, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, Sir Salman said a “small
I told my wife ‘I don’t want to go’ then thought, that’s silly
bump” was found when he had his prostate examined.
He wrote: “After I narrowly survived a murder attempt, now I had to face the prospect of cancer. This was unacceptable. It was unfair.”
After undergoing an MRI scan, he received the results which stated: “Cancer likely”. He added: “On the 1-to-5 scale of probability they used, I had scored a wretched 4.”
However, the author recalled the normal prostate cancer PSA test, which checks the amount of prostatespecific antigen in your blood, showed a different story. After two months, he received the all-clear.
Sir Salman became known across the world in 1989 when Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death.
The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was viewed as blasphemous by many Muslims and banned in Iran.
Iran’s government withdrew support for the death decree in 1998.
The Indian-born author said he had faced about “half a dozen serious assassination attempts”. He had been due to speak about safe places for writers at the event in Chautauqua.
Recalling the 2022 attack, Sir Salman said: “It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time... in order to kill me.
“I think he was just slashing. It was the half minute of intimacy between life and death. I was watching it [blood] spread and then thinking I was probably dying.
“One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me: ‘First you were really unlucky and then you were really lucky’. I said, ‘what’s the lucky part?’ and he said ‘well, the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife’.”
Sir Salman said of his book: “It was the last thing I wanted to do. But I had to write this, to focus on the elephant in the room. It then became a book I really wanted to write.
“Language is a way of breaking open the world. I don’t have any other weapons.”
He describes his assailant as “coming in hard and low. A squat missile.
“In the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see, I saw the man in black run towards me.”
Hadi Matar, 24, denies attempted murder and awaits trial.