When a fatwa was declared against Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, the author adopted a pseudonym – Joseph Anton. He chose it to honour two greats: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In 2012 Rushdie wrote the pseudo-eponymous memoir Joseph Anton in the third person, detailing the decade he spent in hiding after the publication of The Satanic Verses. The third person naturally affords the book a strange, mannered distance. The title was chosen to reflect, in his own words, how “uncomfortable” he felt giving up Salman for an alias, as though it might “help dramatise, for the reader, the deep strangeness and discomfort of those years.”
Last year Rushdie published another memoir, Knife: Meditations, after attempted murder, this time in the first person. It opens frankly: “At a quarter to eleven on August 12 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife ...” And so, the perspective switch from “he” to “I” became the most common observation about Knife. “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” The statement quickly became one of the most quoted lines of Rushdie’s long career.
On Tuesday, the trial against Rushdie’s alleged assailant began in Chautauqua County Court in New York state, 2½ years on from an incident that hospitalised Rushdie for six weeks and left him blind in one eye. He was on stage, about to speak on the “importance of keeping writers safe from harm” at a literary event in the same town, when he was stabbed 15 times. Knife contains an extended fictional imagining of what it might be like for Rushdie to meet his attacker. Now, over the course of this trial, it is expected that he will take to the witness stand and that meeting with his alleged attacker will no longer be confined to imagination.
There was the intentional mainstreaming of the idea that free speech could be played around with as a value, that it was not sacred
No one could really ignore the grim teleology of the incident, 33 years on from the fatwa declared against him (an order for Muslims to kill Rushdie and his editors and publishers, delivered by Khomeini) in protest of the alleged blasphemy of The Satanic Verses. At the time Rushdie was at once a vaunted hero, celebrated for his bravery and held up as a standard-bearer for the central importance of defending free speech; and condemned as a embittered contrarian who needlessly offended serious and sensitive convictions, a “dangerous opportunist” in the words of Roald Dahl. Rushdie himself, we should hope, takes the former view.
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At the very least, it was a prescient debate. The conflict between the right to individual speech versus the need to accommodate the sensibilities of so-called marginalised groups became a perennial theme of the 2010s. And one strange idea prevailed among the once-liberal thinking class: that to defend free speech as an ultimate and absolute value was an unfashionable, unnuanced, normie opinion. Instead it was society’s job to launder offending views and offensive rhetoric out of the public realm, to constrict the free exchange of ideas, to impose unreasonable social consequences on anyone who decided to cross accepted lines.
This argument became the subject of long, discursive essays about how “free speech as an abstract value is now directly at odds with the sanctity of life” (the Guardian in 2019); about how “campus protests against speakers like Richard Spencer are not censorship” (New York Times in 2017); interviews with philosophers who suggest “we shouldn’t think of free speech as an inherently good thing” (Vox, 2019). These are not minority, cherry-picked views from that time period. This was the intentional mainstreaming of the idea that free speech could be played around with as a value, that it was not sacred. The world is very different now, and those who peddled such luxury-beliefs are starting to realise they may have overreached. Plenty are course-correcting now. But we shouldn’t tolerate revisionist history: it happened and many the public intellectual signed up for it.
One such person who didn’t fall for any of it was Rushdie. Hardly surprising. In 2020 he was among those who signed the “Letter on justice and open debate” in Harper’s magazine about the “stifling atmosphere” of “censoriousness” (once reserved for the radical right) that had seeped into the culture. The Daily Beast referred to the signatories – which includes JK Rowling – as “thin-skinned ... fools”.
It is frivolous to compare what happened to Rushdie to the spectre of censoriousness that emerged in the late 2010s; they are by some order of magnitude different things. But the trial of the man accused of knifing Rushie is a good time nonetheless to remember the people who came for freedom of speech, who tried to quash it as an ultimate value, and who believed it was fair and good to expunge opinions from the public realm because they were at odds with personal political projects. Their position was shallow and pernicious. Luckily there exist champions such as Rushdie to expose them.
