‘Badass’ Salman Rushdie says he has no symptoms of PTSD after 2022 attack | Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie says he has no symptoms of PTSD despite nearly dying from being stabbed during an assassination attempt in 2022, prompting his therapist to humorously conclude it’s because the famous novelist is “naive.”

Rushdie shared this hilarious anecdote during an interview aired on CBS News Sunday morning, in which he discussed his new short story collection, “The Eleventh Hour” — while also revisiting the attack on a literary gathering in western New York that left him blind in his right eye.

Rushdie’s interviewer, Martha Tishner, said she was struck by how he did not seem bitter or angry about the stabbing that ultimately led to a long prison sentence for his convicted attacker. “Most people would say…that’s an obvious recipe for a life with PTSD,” she said, yet he published a memoir in 2024 about the assault – The Knife – and has now followed it up with The Eleventh Hour.

“Well, I have a therapist, and I once asked him to list the symptoms of PTSD,” Rushdie replied in his characteristically calm tone. And I said, “But I don’t seem to have these symptoms, so what’s wrong with me?”

“And he said, ‘Well, it’s because you’re a bad person,’ that’s the technical term.”

The attack on the Indian-born American-British writer occurred more than 35 years after his first death sentence, or fatwa, was issued by Iranian religious leaders who resented his depiction of Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie was on stage giving a lecture in the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institute when Hadi Matar – with the aim of implementing the fatwa – stabbed him in the head, neck, torso and left hand, resulting in serious injuries to his right eye, liver and intestines. The damage to Rushdie’s right eye was permanent, leaving him unable to see, although he made a significant recovery from several other injuries.

Mattar was convicted last February of attempted murder, and was later sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was also sentenced to seven years in prison for wounding Rushdie’s lecture director, Ralph Henry Rees.

Rushdie explained on Sunday that Matar’s actions had already changed some aspects of his life. It is worth noting that he previously refused to read books on tablet computers – but now he does.

Rushdie said: “I find that I use iPads in a way that I was not accustomed to before… because there is light” on their screens. “I can adjust the type size. I’ve never read a book on my iPad, but I do now.”

He also said that “to confront things publicly, there has to be security in a way that there wasn’t” in the years before he was stabbed by Matar.

Rushdie has held US citizenship since 2016, the year Donald Trump won the first of his two presidential terms. After Trump’s second presidency began in January, his administration sought to deport as many immigrants as possible from the United States.

Tishner asked Rushdie whether the feeling he had when he became an American citizen “has become fractured or changed based on what has happened since then, both in public life and in the United States.” [US] “And to you.”

Rushdie admitted that “it was a difficult time in America” ​​before adding: “If you think of countries as people, you will find some that are better and others that are less good. It would be nice to remember that these countries themselves are better.”