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.

Article

Assisted dying

Care

Comment

Death & life

9 January 2024

6 min read

What do you make of Esther?

A campaigner’s call to change an assisted dying law got family calling MND sufferer Michael Wenham. Here he shares why such legalisation will increase people’s fear of dying.

Michael Wenham

Michael Wenham lives with a motor neurone disorder, Primary Lateral Sclerosis. He blogs at My Donkey Body.

Today Programme post about Esther Rantzen's comments.

BBC.

"What do you make of Esther Rantzen?" asked my brother.

I knew what he was talking about, as no doubt all listeners of Radio 4's Today Programme would have done. Clearly the advocates of assisted dying, or specifically suicide, have launched the next round of their campaign, even enlisting the late Diana Rigg, whose resemblance to my wife was once commented on by an old welsh policemen, as a witness. The Today Programme devoted a great deal of airtime to the subject over a number of days.

My reply to my brother was that I thought it was a good thing if we were more open about the subject of death and dying. After all they are events everyone without exception will come in contact with at some point or another. So, the sooner we stop treating it as a taboo subject the better. However, the dangers of legalising assisted suicide, are proved by places like Canada and Belgium.

I don’t see any way to protect us from such coercion, internal or external, except to demonstrate through legislation that every life, however tenuous, is equally important.

In January this year I made a submission to the Parliamentary Health and Social Care Committee consultation on assisted dying/assisted suicide. Here’s some of that submission.

“I am writing as an individual who was diagnosed with a rare form of Motor Neurone Disease (MND) twenty-two years ago and who has experienced the condition’s relentless deterioration since then. There are a number of my contemporaries who have survived that long. That, and witnessing the ravages of the disease on friends in our local MNDA branch plus an Ethics qualification from Oxford, is the extent of my expertise.”

“My first observation is how positively my contemporaries, with short or longer prognoses, with the disease seize hold of life. Clearly there are some who, like Rob Burrows, devote themselves to fund-raising and creating awareness; while others enjoy the opportunities of life that come their way. What might have seemed a death sentence has proved a challenge to live.

"Secondly, I have recently discovered myself how expert professional care can enhance what is often portrayed as undignified dependence. Good caring can in fact add to quality of life. The sad thing however is that it is not something which the state will normally provide. Along with terminal palliative care, domestic social care must surely be a spending priority for any government that cares about the well-being of all its citizens. I’m fortunate to live an area of excellent MND provision and good, though not abundant, palliative care. But I understand that this is not equally spread through the country. If it were, I suspect it would reduce the fear of dying which must be a major motivator for assistance to ending one’s life.

"Ironically, in MND, according to the Association’s information sheet, How will I die?, those fears are greatly exaggerated:

In reality, most people with MND have a peaceful death. The final stages of MND will usually involve gradual weakening of the breathing muscles and increasing sleepiness. This is usually the cause of death, either because of an infection or because the muscles stop working.

Specialist palliative care supports quality of life through symptom control. practical help, medication to ease symptoms and emotional support for you and your family.

When breathing becomes weaker, you may feel breathless and this can be distressing. However, your health care professionals can provide support to reduce anxiety.

You can also receive medication to ease symptoms throughout the course of the disease, not just in the later stages. If you have any concerns about the way medication will affect you, ask the professionals who are supporting you for guidance.

Further weakening of the muscles involved in breathing will cause tiredness and increasing sleepiness. Over a period of time, which can be hours, days or weeks, your breathing is likely to become shallower. This usually leads to reduced consciousness, so that death comes peacefully as breathing slowly reduces and eventually stops.

"So, this is a third and subtle danger of legalising assisted dying/suicide. It would increase people’s fear of the inevitable fact of death and dying. I think this can be one factor in explaining why, in jurisdictions which have introduced it, we see it being extended beyond the first strict limits. It is held out as an answer to this fearful fact, death, whereas in fact death and dying should be talked about in realistic terms, as normal, as concisely outlined by Dr Kathryn Mannix. As she says, normally dying isn’t as bad as we think.

If the government should be doing anything, the first thing it might well do, is to promote informed education about dying of the sort exemplified by specialists such as Dr Mannix, as well as adequately funding her former specialism of palliative care. It should start with schools’ curricula. After all every child will have encountered death at some stage.

Finally, the dangers of coercion, in my experience, are not so much external as internal. It’s often rightly observed that prolonged pain is worse for the engaged spectator than for the sufferer. If you care for someone, seeing them struggling is barely tolerable. You may wish to see their struggle over, but underlying that wish is your own desire to be spared more of your own horror show. The person who is ‘suffering’ however has that strong survival instinct, common to all humans, and is more concentrated on living than dying. Having said that, when you are depressed, as might be natural, that instinct gets temporarily eclipsed. Then you need protection from your own dark sky. It is at such times that your other inner demons emerge: your sense of being a burden - to your family, to your friends (if you have any), to the NHS and to the state purse; your fear of losing your savings and of leaving nothing to your loved ones; your fear of pain and of dying (exaggerated by popular mythology), and your sense of suffering, heightened by your depression.

"For most of us with long incurable diseases, it’s these internal perceptions that are most coercive, although they can be easily compounded or even exploited from outside. I don’t see any way to protect us from such coercion, internal or external, except to demonstrate through legislation that every life, however tenuous, is equally important to our society and worth caring for. ‘Any man’s death diminishes me...’ and so we will value it to the end."

I'm grateful that when I received my 'motor neurone disorder' diagnosis, which was initially frightening, I couldn't be tempted to opt for an early death. Instead of one Christmas with my family (as I warned them), I've enjoyed 22 more Christmases. That was the law against suicide fulfilling its safeguarding function, protecting the vulnerable, as I was then. Contrary to my preconceptions, my form of MND (PLS) is very gradual and I've been able to live a full if increasingly limited life, thanks to my wife, Jane, who cares for me 100 per cent. 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

My view is still that legalising assisted dying/suicide has more cons than pros. The better choice is to invest in hospice and palliative care, so that everyone may have access to pain and symptom care in the last years of their life.