Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly review – a harrowing first-person account of a knife attack

The British-Indian writer relives his horrific 2022 stabbing in shocking detail – and opens up about how heading back to the scene of the crime helped him

‘One of the first things I thought when I saw him coming at me was: ‘Oh, it’s you … ’ I did wonder if someone was going to jump out of an audience one day.” When news broke in August 2022 that the novelist Salman Rushdie had been stabbed by a man who invaded the stage during a literary event in Chautauqua, Pennsylvania, the impact of what had happened was unique: it was shocking but not surprising. Nobody wondered why on earth anyone would suddenly attack an ageing British-Indian writer.

Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly gives Rushdie the chance to recall the attack in his own words, as he has in his new memoir, Knife. The film also fills in the backstory, although it sketches it lightly on the assumption that viewers will know it already. In 1988, a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination was imposed on him by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, after the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie at first lived under police protection, not appearing in public; gradually he re-emerged as the threat, it was assumed, subsided.