Salman Rushdie on Jihadism, Fascism and the Fight for Free Expression: ‘Everybody’s Gone Crazy’

The remarkable life of novelist Salman Rushdie hit a new peak at the Sundance Film Festival as “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” a documentary about the stabbing attack that nearly killed him in 2022, debuted during a weekend of just as shocking U.S. political violence.

The unrest in Minnesota was impossible to avoid this weekend and it threw the historic events of Rushdie’s life into sharp relief, from his continuing to write in the face of a 1989 religious death edict to his insistence on chronicling the gruesome violence of the 2022 attack to bear witness to the current risks to artistic freedom.

We spoke on the day that…