Rushdie assault an attack on more than freedom of speech

Salman Rushdie is a writer of great intelligence, imagination, and invention. But above all, in my experience, he possesses two qualities that set him apart from those seeking to murder him for a novel that most of them have surely never read: complexity and nuance.

And those qualities are indispensable to unraveling the wider implications of last week’s horrific knife attack on the British author at a literary event in western New York.

The attack itself was anything but an act of nuance. It was a frontal