Article

Comment

Trauma

9 May 2024

5 min read

Bitterness and weaponised words can’t soften scars

Finding peace for Daniel Anjorin, Salman Rushdie and Bishop Mar Mari.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A man sits being interviewed and holds a hand to the side of his face, one lens of his glasses is tinted black.

Salman Rushdie discusses his attack.

BBC.

Knife crime around the world is unacceptably high, and with around 50,000 offences expected this year in the UK, it is sadly no surprise when we hear tragic news stories involving knives and sharp instruments. Recently, it was the terrible circumstances of the death of Daniel Anjorin that made the headlines. The gentle, much-loved, 14-year-old boy was on his way to school in East London when he, along with several others, was randomly attacked by a man with a sword. He died from his wounds shortly after being taken to hospital.

I happened to be in the middle of listening to Knife, a memoir by Salman Rushdie, when the news broke of that tragedy. It is another heart-rending story. Rushdie describes how, in 2022, during a speech he was giving about the need to protect writers, a man ran onto the stage and frantically stabbed him 15 times. Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital and survived the attack but lost an eye. Then began his difficult physical and emotional journey towards recovery, documented in the book he never wanted to write.

It was not the first time Rushdie had been the victim of aggression. In 1988, following the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, the Iranian government called for Rushdie’s death by issuing a fatwa against him. His book was perceived to be blasphemous to the Islamic faith, and despite ten years of round-the-clock police protection in London, he faced several serious assassination attempts.

The fatwa was lifted in 1998, but twenty-four years later, Rushdie was clearly still not safe. He recounts the moment when he saw the man running at him in the darkness as he gave his lecture.

“My first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was: So it is you. Here you are…. It struck me as anachronistic. This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now after all these years? Surely the world had moved on, and that subject was closed. Yet here, approaching fast, was a sort of time traveller, a murderous ghost from the past.”

I can’t imagine how I would cope in his shoes. I have not had to experience the daily fear of assassination for decades as Rushdie has. In all my years of delivering speeches and sermons on stages around the world, I have never had cause to even contemplate the possibility of an attempt on my life. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear in Rushdie’s voice, the words he chose to say to his attacker:

“If I think of you at all in the future it will be with a dismissive shrug. I don't forgive you. I don't not forgive you. You are simply irrelevant to me, and from now on, for the rest of your days, you will be irrelevant to everyone else. I'm glad I have my life and not yours and my life will go on.”

Rushdie admits that his words are his weapons – and he certainly uses them to good effect. They are sharp. They are designed to eviscerate. They are calculated to cause pain. They express derision towards his attacker. Part of me cheers him on: a defenceless man in his seventies who walked into a lecture hall expecting to give a speech to rapturous applause but left barely alive as the victim of a brutal frenzied attack. Like the plot of every action movie I have ever seen, the story seems to have a happy ending – the hero is saved, the bad guy is locked up and justice is seen to be done.

But there is another part of me that knows these Hollywood endings can’t be trusted. Those 27 seconds of violence have clearly left Rushdie reduced to spitting insults at a young man in prison. He claims his life now is “filled with love”, but sadly there is little evidence of it in the way he addresses the radicalised 24-year-old. Bitterness and weaponised words, however eloquent, can’t soften the scars, nor do they make the world a safer place.

Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back.

I can’t help but compare Rushdie’s reaction with that of Bishop Mar Mari Emanuel. The day before Knife was published, the Iraqi-born bishop was preaching at his church in Sydney, Australia, when he too was attacked by a young man with a knife, and, like Rushdie, ended up losing an eye. The attack was an overt terrorist act against Bishop Mar Mari, a controversial figure who has spoken dismissively about the Islamic, Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities.

Despite the striking similarities between the two men’s terrible ordeals, the contrast in their response couldn’t be starker. Speaking just two weeks later at a Palm Sunday service, Bishop Emanuel affirmed that he had forgiven his teenage assailant:

‘I say to you, my dear, you are my son, and you will always be my son. I will always pray for you. I’ll always wish you nothing but the best. I pray that my Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ of Nazareth, to enlighten your heart and enlighten your soul your entire being to realise, my dear, there is only one God who art in heaven…. the Lord knows it is coming from the bottom of my heart. I’ll always pray for you and for whoever was in this act. In the name of my Jesus, I forgive you. I love you, and I will always pray for you.”

Woven into the fabric of every form of Christianity is a commitment to love and forgiveness, clearly exemplified for us here by Bishop Mar Mari. His words resonated around the world this week as he returned to the pulpit where he was stabbed, bandage over one of his eyes, to speak out with kindness and compassion.

I am deeply challenged by the bishop’s response. I have never experienced the physical pain and emotional trauma of a knife attack. Indeed, I have found it difficult to forgive the comparatively trivial experience of being metaphorically stabbed in the back. I know how hard it is, to be gracious to those who deliberately cause pain to me or to my family members through their actions. Like Rushdie, I sometimes I would like nothing more than to see them locked up, living a loveless, meaningless, irrelevant life. But this is not the Christian way. I follow Jesus who forgave the soldiers driving nails through his hands and feet, so I must strive to be compassionate to those who do us much lesser harm, as well as seek, in his name, to tackle the underlying causes for the greater dis-ease in society.

The issues that lead to knife crime are many and complex. They include poverty, fear of victimisation, gang culture, radicalisation, distrust of authorities, lack of education, experience of violence in childhood, and much more. Whatever we can do to tackle these problems, we do for the sake of love and peace in our world. Perhaps as we seek to overcome these things together, we can work towards a day when what happened to Daniel Anjorin on 30th April can never happen again.

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Comment

Community

Sustainability

Wildness

12 June 2025

5 min read

What my noisy, messy crow neighbours have taught me about how to live

We can’t control nature; we just need to become more porous to it

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Meet the neighbours.

Townsend Walton on Unsplash.

Our neighbours hate our crows. I can’t blame them. The hundreds of crows that occupy the tops of the ancient pines which surround our rural manse are the noisiest and messiest residents I have ever lived near. They greet each sunrise with a din of caws and counter-caws, as if they are deeply concerned that anyone might miss this momentous daily event or the fact that it’s now happening before 5:30a.m. In nesting season, which lasts most of April and May, our car is easily identifiable in any carpark by the crusted grey spots with which the crows see fit to adorn it. Within a week of moving in, we gave up on the washing line so invitingly strung between two of the pines. Our pristine whites were too tempting a target for our crows.

I do not attend the meetings of our local community council, but I hear whispers of what transpires there. Our crows, evidently, have been a regular topic of conversation. Multiple solutions have been proffered for driving them away. All have been tried and all have failed. Our crows cling fiercely to their homes and their determination is more than a match for any human efforts. If I have the vibe of my community right, at least some of its members feel that there’s something perverse, obscene even, about a flock of birds being allowed to upset our human right to create a serene, comfortable, and convenient habitation. Our clump of houses is surrounded by a visually stunning landscape; shouldn’t the aural landscape be equally beautiful?

If my family does not mind our crows, it is because the treetop drama is just one more example of many natural encroachments on the house, some more welcome than others.

Every year we celebrate the miraculous return to our eaves of house martins, home from their intercontinental peregrinations. We look forward to another summer spent watching their acrobatics and listening to their chicks in the nests an arm’s length from our windows.

Clearing up the mess of our attic’s bats is an annual chore, one thankfully performed stoically by our church’s property convener, but there are compensations - such as the twilight shows they put on outside our living room window, performing impossible turns and reversals midair in their search for prey.

Less welcome are the massive spiders, which are a perennial presence; the slugs, which seemed to apparate onto the hall carpet all through winter, the mice, two of whom sacrificed themselves to knock our dishwasher out of action by chewing through its hose; and the wasps who built a nest the size of a telephone box in the roof space above our back bathroom.

Least fun of all has been what we call the Great Earwig Migrations, which have happened twice in our half-decade in the manse and which involve weeks of finding the little bugs under, seemingly, every object and on every surface.

When we moved into the manse, we expected challenges, the high heating bills, the leaking roof, and the isolation of the countryside. What we did not expect was the experience of porousness; the shock of realising that we had so little control over what other forms of life saw fit to share our habitation with us.

At first it felt to me perverse, obscene even, that a house, even a 120-year-old house, should be so vulnerable to incursions by animal creation. Shouldn’t our home, our space, be a haven where we can control who or what enters, who or what we feel comfortable with, and who or what we can exclude?

If I had to give a name to this expectation, maybe it would be that of the buffered home, a play on philosopher Charles Taylor’s description of the modern self as buffered. Taylor contrasts the selves we aspire to be in modernity, ones able to control and order our bodies, our space, our lives, and our relationships so that they accord with our autonomous desires and actions, with those of our premodern ancestors. Medievals and ancients assumed porosity. Bodies were subject not just to biological infection, but spiritual infections too. Projects and plans were frustrated not just by mistakes or personal failings, but by the ever-fickle whims of the goddess Fortuna. Their lives, their bodies, their homes, existed in a perpetual state of vulnerability. The threat of everything falling apart was always on the horizon.

We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security.

Modern technology has helped us tame the more unwelcome of these forces, but it has also given us an overly naive expectation that all that is inconvenient about nature can and should be gradually eliminated. This expectation frames the way we respond to worries about climate change and other creeping environmental crises. We want nature to survive, flourish even, but not at the cost of our comforts or our sense of autonomy and security. But as our ancestors might remind us, we are part of nature too, and, just as in any relationship, mutual vulnerability and sacrifice are needed if we are all going to survive. This is scary, but there are resources within Christianity - within other faiths too - to help us understand that there are benefits to affirming our vulnerability, our porosity.

My daughters love our crows. They point in wonder as the crows flood into the sky at dusk, hundreds of them making a giant circle once, then twice round the garden, before settling down for the night. When, in late May, grounded fledgings appear, bundles of feathers shocked at the sudden inhospitality of the nest, too stunned to realise they can fly home, my daughters watch over them, anxious lest the local cats take advantage of their bewilderment.

A few Sundays ago, my youngest, who struggles to stay quiet and well-behaved in Sunday School, pulled me out of church early. We sat on the church lawn staring up at the crows and soon were adapting the andante melodies of that Sunday’s hymns into imagined songs of praise that crows might sing. “No,” my youngest said, simpatico with the crows as she is, “I think they’d want something more upbeat.” And so we tried setting our own corvid-themed praise lyrics to Rosé and Bruno Mars’ song APT, while listening to the caw and counter-caw above. “Dad, how do you think God sees the world?” she asked me when we finished. I stumbled through my best theologically informed explanation of how God could be in every part of creation without being of it, before she stopped me. “I think it’s like a giant snow globe that he holds in his hands.” Watching the birds swirl around us, two stationary figures caught by the same currents of air that were sweeping them aloft, what could I do but agree?

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