To Salman Rushdie, a dream before his attempted murder ‘felt like a premonition’

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Sam Leith has narrated this article for you to listen to.

Salman Rushdie has long hated and struggled against the idea that the 1989 fatwa pronounced on him after the publication of The Satanic Verses should define his career or his life. It was, as he frequently pointed out, a book he published only a quarter of the way through his career. He wanted the life of a writer, and for his books – even ‘that book’ – to be read as books rather than as footnotes to an episode in his biography or tokens in some pre-digital culture wars.

He thought he had managed that. The only people who ever asked him about the fatwa, he told me when we met in 2020, were journalists: ‘to be dragged back into the late 1980s is boring.’ At the beginning of 2022, he was living an ordinary and very happy life in New York with his fifth wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. He had just finished a new novel, Victory. He was, as he now preferred to be, close to anonymous: the tabloids no longer pursued him, and this unexpected and fulfilling late-life romance and marriage (about which he writes movingly) had gone, by design, almost unnoticed by the public. Then he went to give a reading in Chautauqua, upstate New York, and a young man rushed out of the audience with a knife and tried to kill him. 

Looking back on the night before, Rushdie describes himself, happy in bed: ‘The future rushes at him while he sleeps. Except strangely, it’s really the past returning, my own past rushing at me […] The revenant past, seeking to drag me back in time.’