Salman Rushdie: "I feel a line of connection with 9/11"

Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response to it from much of the Muslim world.

He believed that his life of extreme measures and isolation was a closed chapter in 1998, after Iran stepped back from the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. But four summers ago, in a quiet lake town in New York, death came knocking again. Rushdie was about to give a public lecture when a man ran on stage and attacked him with a knife.

He first revisited this attempt on his life in his 2024 book Knife. Now, with his wife, the poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and director Alex Gibney, Rushdie has retold this life-changing moment through film. 

He spoke with Tanjil Rashid on the eve of the 25th anniversary of  9/11, with which he feels a “line of connection” - between the attack on himself and the attack on his adopted home in New York, and reflected on what it means to live in this age of terror.

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