_{Salman Rushdie DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES}

Before Larry David made the fatwa against Salman Rushdie a joke, it was no joke. Going back to the 1980’s, the author had published a novel, The Satanic Verses, that famously became the cause for a call to Rushdie’s death. For the world, the fatwa was an irrational response by the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a misreading of Rushdie’s imagining the prophet Mohammed as a secular man. Even without reading the book, all of Islam was bid to carry out a punishment by death of the author. 

To survive, Rushdie was moved from safe house to house for years. Public appearances were risky, but he took them in an attempt to maintain a fear-defying life. Publishers, translators, bookstore proprietors were threatened, some killed. Then, the fatwa was lifted, and still, in 2022, a young brainwashed zealot from New Jersey arrived at a reading at Chautauqua, storming the stage with a knife, stabbing multiple times, taking out one of Rushdie’s eyes. 

At that, he was lucky to be alive and tell the tale which he did in a book called Knife. His wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, the author’s fifth, had filmed his medical ordeal and interviewed filmmakers to put a proper narrative documentary together. After a screening this week, at an afterparty at Barbuto, she said, after meeting the Academy Award winning documentarian Alex Gibney, they wanted him to do the job.

Laced with Salman Rushdie’s reading from Knife, and Griffiths’ footage, KNIFE: THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SALMAN RUSHDIE, does not shy away from the grim bloody mess of Salman’s eye. While they do not forgive the deed, the young man, Hadi Matar, is viewed as a victim of blind indoctrination, now incarcerated for life.

As to Gibney, a master filmmaker, this was all in a day’s work. Next up, his long awaited, 4 hour  film on Elon Musk.