Salman Rushdie on Being Violently Attacked and the Love That Healed Him Amanpour and Company

Freedom of expression is at the heart of democratic values. One might consider author Salman Rushdie a wounded veteran of the fight for free speech. More than 30 years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran imposed a fatwa calling for Rushdie's assassination because of a book he had never read but called blasphemous: "The Satanic Verses /". In recent years, the threat seemed to have receded – until August 2022, when a young American man armed with a knife violently attacked Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York, as he was about to speak on the issue of safety of writers. Rushdie almost died. He wrote about the attack and the love that helped him triumph over death in a new memoir, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."

Originally broadcast on April 24, 2024

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Amanpour and Company features wide-ranging, in-depth conversations with global thought leaders and cultural influencers on the issues and trends impacting the world every day, from politics, business and technology to arts, science and sports. Christiane Amanpour leads the conversation on global and national news from London with contributions from distinguished journalists Walter Isaacson, Michel Martin, Alicia Menendez and Hari Sreenivasan from the Tisch WNET studios at Lincoln Center in New York.

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