Sir Salman Rushdie is first and foremost a novelist, a creator of fiction, an artist. He is brilliant at it and, deservedly, much decorated. His fifteen published novels have been translated into dozens of languages, won the world’s most glittering literary prizes, and attracted the plaudits of critics around the globe.

So it is an appalling fact that this is not the thing for which he is most famous. In 1989, the theocratic tyranny that is modern Iran imposed on him a fatwa, condemning Rushdie to death for his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. For more than a decade thereafter Salman Rushdie lived in hiding, under the protection of the British security services, moving to New York about twenty years ago in order to re-emerge back into public life. In 2022 he was brutally attacked—stabbed very nearly to death—an attempted murder which cost him (forever) the sight of one eye and (for a year) the use of one hand.

For more than 35 years, then, Salman Rushdie has had more cause than most to reflect on freedom, free speech, religious sensibility, reason, reasonableness, tyranny, violence, writing, words, and art. In the course of that time, as well as continuing to publish extraordinary novels of marvel and miracle, of wonder and awe (Haroun and the Sea of Stories [1990] and Victory City [2023] are among my personal favourites), Rushdie has produced a range of writings that touch on aspects of free speech. These include well-known essays such as “In Good Faith” and “Is Nothing Sacred?” (both 1990), several passages of the memoir of his years in hiding, Joseph Anton (2012), and, most recently, Knife (2024), a book which, as its subtitle tells us, is a work of “meditations after an attempted murder.”

Knife, by some distance, is Rushdie’s best work of nonfiction. Joseph Anton includes passages that no one interested in Rushdie’s life and work would want to overlook but, like his period in hiding, it goes on too long and becomes less interesting the further into it you get. (Perhaps that was its point.) Knife, by contrast, grabs you by the throat from beginning to end and does not let go. Like all of Salman Rushdie’s supporters and his millions of fans, I wish he had never needed to write it. But it is nonetheless unputdownable.

This, in part, is because Rushdie’s sublime gift for story-telling is used to the fullest in Knife: reading it, you can tell you are in the hands of a master novelist. But it is also because Knife is the most thoughtful and reflective—the most meditative—of all Rushdie’s non-fiction writing. Some of his earlier non-fiction (quite understandably) is strident. Consider, from “In Good Faith,” this: “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist.” For sure. Is this not, though, only part of the picture? Even if we have the right to offend one another, this does not necessarily mean we should exercise it. Still less does it mean that we should feel free to exercise it without pausing to consider what the impact of our words might be on our audience.

Rushdie’s earlier defences of his freedom to write were (again, quite understandably) all about him—about what he intended, about his purposes: “Dispute was intended,” he says of The Satanic Verses, “and dissent, and even, at times, satire, and criticism of intolerance, and the like.” Freedom of speech, however, requires that we think not only about our purposes when we speak, but also about the likely effects our words may have. We might not intend to cause harm when we shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre but if the effect of our speech is that others are hurt, does that not reflect back on us—should that not condition our speech—or, at least, make us think twice?

In the UK (and likewise in Canada and many other countries), it is an offence to act or speak in a way that has the effect of stirring up racial hatred, whether one intends to stir up hatred or whether one’s words or behaviour are likely stir up hatred. It is rarely enough, when thinking about free speech, to focus only on authorial intention. The effects of one’s words matter. Rushdie appears to disagree: “If you are afraid of the consequences of what you say, then you are not free,” he claims. Whilst we should indeed not live in fear of what we say, we should nonetheless consider the consequences of what we say. Both the law and the principle of free speech require that we do so.

It should go without saying—but given how much bilge has been written about Salman Rushdie it cannot go without saying—that none of this is to suggest that “Rushdie brought the fatwa on himself” or that “he knew what he was doing.” To suggest, as I do, that Rushdie does not get everything right about free speech is very far from claiming, as I do not, that Rushdie gets most things wrong. He is right about a lot of things. He is right that freedom is “progressive, irreverent, sceptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid,” whereas its opposite—tyranny—is “rigid, blinkered, absolutist.” He is also right that the latter is much easier to keep hold of and that the “fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture” of freedom is more vulnerable (a point made long ago by John Milton in Paradise Lost and as true now as it was then). Rushdie is right, too, that the first struggle for free speech was fought not against the state but against the church and that “blasphemy and heresy, far from being the greatest evils, are the methods by which human thought has made its most vital advances.” And he is not merely right but at his brilliant best when he writes (in “Messages from the Plague Years” [1992]) that:

Free societies are societies in motion, and with motion comes friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. Totalitarian societies seek to replace the many truths of freedom by the one truth of power, be it secular or religious; to halt the motion of society, to snuff out its spark. Unfreedom’s primary purpose is invariably to shackle the mind.

Most importantly, he is also right that free speech takes great courage. In this regard, he has led not only by the example of his words, but by the inspirational example of his life and actions. He simply refused to be terrorized, to let fear rule his life, even when he was scared. It wasn’t that the fatwa came to an end: it was that Sir Salman Rushdie refused to accept any longer that he should live under the yoke of its tyranny. As he recorded in Joseph Anton, Rushdie believes in “scepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee.” He believes these are worth fighting for, even if the fight may cost him his life. And, somehow, he has the immense depth of courage which enables him “never again [to] flinch” from their defence.

When I was a child, growing up in 1970s England, a school nursery rhyme used to be sung against the playground bullies: “Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me.” The defiance of the message may be admirable but it is, of course, a conceit. Name-calling can hurt; words can harm. They can be used not only as a shield, as a reasoned argument to protect against arbitrariness, but as a sword—as a knife.

Rushdie, after a decade of hiding that went on as long only because the British security services insisted on it, refused to allow his life to be dictated by the fatwa and took ownership once again of his own freedom (Rushdie knows that freedom has to be asserted). So too, after his attack, he sought to grab as powerfully as he could the weapon that was used against him. In Knife, he is not fighting back with a literal blade, but he is avowedly using words as his tool—as his knife—to take ownership of what happened to him. He knows that he can never erase the attack from his life but, at the same time, he is determined not to allow it to define his life. Only he has the right to define his life and he is as fearless as ever in asserting and reasserting it. His bravery really is remarkable. This is what he writes:

Language, too, was a knife. It could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner working, its secrets, its truths. It could cut from one reality to another. It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife. … It could be the tool I would use to remake and reclaim my world, to rebuild the frame in which my picture of the world could once more hang on my wall.

This is beautiful as well as true. In Rushdie’s gifted hands, now that he has the use of both of them again, language does indeed reveal inner secrets, it does indeed cut from one reality to another (his novels are full of this), and it does indeed create great beauty.

But even in using this sharpest of metaphors, Rushdie shies away from admitting that other great truth—that other point—of knives, a rather uglier but no less pressing truth. They are weapons, too. Yes, we need them to cut into the truth. But yes, they can also be misused, even abused, and sliced into things that ought really to be left intact, uncut. Rushdie knows this. A handful of pages after the words just quoted he complains, as he has rightly complained many times, of the “hurtful quantity of sharp criticism” which was meted out to him after the fatwa. For every Christopher Hitchens who rose to defend his right to write The Satanic Verses there were all too many Hugh Trevor-Ropers, John Le Carrés, Germaine Greers, or Boris Johnsons who to their shame did not.

Criticism can indeed be sharp, like a knife. And it can indeed hurt. When wielding the knife of language, we should take care, just as we should when chopping vegetables or slicing bread, not inadvertently to cause harm. This does not mean we should abandon all use of knives any more than it means we should reject the free use of words and subject ourselves to censorship. But admitting to the havoc words can wreak, rather than simply pretending they never can, is likely to make us even finer wordsmiths, just as every great chef knows we need to be very careful around knives. To come full circle, it is not just the purpose of knife-using we need to bear in mind, but also its effect.

Knife reveals another curiosity about Rushdie’s reflections on free speech. He says at one point that “ever since conservatives started laying claim to it … liberals and progressives [have] started backing away from it.” He is quite right that, in both Britain and America, it is the left that has lost sight of its commitment to free speech rather than the political right. He is quite right, also, to bemoan this. Free speech has become caught in the culture wars and this is a profoundly unsafe place for it to be. Freedom of speech, properly understood, is neither a conservative nor a progressive value, but an overarching principle that both the left and the right should admire and celebrate equally. Whereas it is certainly true that “conservatives have started laying claim to it” this is not the cause of the modern left’s retreat from free speech, but a reaction to the modern left’s retreat from it. And Salman Rushdie should not be bemoaning the right’s championing of free speech: he should be commending it. You cannot go off the idea of free speech just because you find disagreeable the politics of some of those who defend it.

John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), foresaw that it would not be the state or the government so much as social censure that would pose the greatest threat to free speech. And so it has transpired. Cancel culture is not a tool of government, but of the culture warriors of the modern identitarian left who, as Rushdie puts it, hold that people are simply “no longer … entitled to dispute the new norms.” If the new norm is that Israel is the aggressor and Hamas the victim, so be it: let us not debate this but silence all opposition to it. If the new norm is that any biological man may self-identify as a woman, so be it: let us not debate the relation of sex to gender but cancel anyone who disagrees, by labelling them a bigot. Rushdie writes that the modern left’s “move away from First Amendment principles allowed that venerable piece of the Constitution to be co-opted by the right.” But that is entirely the wrong verb. The First Amendment has not been “co-opted” by the right. It is being defended by the right in the face of unprecedented hostility shown to its liberal values by the modern censorious left.

Our commitment to free speech is tested not by our desire to defend speech we agree with, but by our desire to defend speech we find objectionable. That has been a truism since the time of Voltaire. But our commitment to free speech is also tested by whether we still want to champion it even when we find some of its modern proponents to be politically distasteful.

Salman Rushdie is a brilliant writer, whose work I have enjoyed reading since I first came across it as a student, 35 years ago. He is a thoughtful, clever, impassioned writer about free speech. One can admire, indeed love, his work, including on that subject, without falling into the trap of assuming that everything he has to say about it is flawless.