Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
The year 1989 was a pivotal one in the spread of freedom. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, the electoral victory of the Solidarity trade union in Poland, the collapse of the Berlin Wall—all helped bring about the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet Union and augured a better, more tolerant world.
But 1989 was also a year in which the forces of illiberalism and religious obscurantism made ominous gains. The Chinese Communist Party brutally extinguished a pro-democracy movement in Tiananmen Square, and the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the death of the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses.
