Do we like Salman Rushdie?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of principled, costly stands and a very decent record, held back only by some contested remarks on trans issues.
Rushdie was born in Bombay and made his name as a novelist, then became famous for the wrong reason: The Satanic Verses and the Iranian death threat that followed it. He has spent most of his adult life being a symbol whether he liked it or not. In 2022 he was stabbed on stage at a literary event in New York, and he later wrote the memoir Knife about it.
That attack has had a long legal tail. Hadi Matar got the maximum 25 years for attempted murder in a New York state court in May 2025. In July 2026 a federal jury convicted him on three terrorism-related counts, including attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah, and he's due to be sentenced on 3 November. Rushdie testified at the trial.
On the harm check, the one thing that gets him a asterisk is a 2017 interview. He said he knows two people who transitioned, that both seemed much happier, and that he was not hostile to it. He also voiced worry about over-insistence on these issues with very young people and said we maybe need to “back off a little bit”. Trans readers could fairly hear that as unhelpful, and he's since not been found campaigning on it.
Beyond that we found no slide into conspiracy theories, no anti-vax or election-denial material, and no run of films or projects with people who push harm. Several viral quotes attacking Muslims that were pinned on him were checked and found to be fake, so don't trust the screenshots. The record is thin on climate, so we can't say more there.
The latest is a National Book Foundation medal for lifetime achievement, announced in September, to be presented on 18 November by his old friend, the author Kiran Desai. For a bloke who spent decades with security around him, that's a nice bookend. Nothing else lately suggests a fresh controversy.