Four years after an extremist stabbed him, Salman Rushdie says he has thought about visiting the man who stabbed him

Beginning on Valentine’s Day of 1989, the Booker Prize winning author Salman Rushdie had a sword hanging over his head.For a period of time, threats of death followed him everywhere.

The bloody culmination of his life spent alternately on the run and in public — with near-lethal consequences — is captured in “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” a new documentary about Rushdie, his marriage and the dangers of fanaticism.Plagued by threats, Rushdie lived in hiding for some nine years, operated under the pseudonym Joseph Anton (cribbing the first and last names of two favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov) and traveled by armored Jaguar. This was for good reason: Islamist leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa against him, encouraging Muslims to murder Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family himself.The mandate felt as serious as a mafia contract.Followers of Khomeini cursed Rushdie and rioters burned effigies of the author.

All of that was set off by his book “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which Khomeini believed blasphemed Mohammed.“This was horrifying,” Rushdie told The Post about seeing his face set alight on international newscasts.

“I was already reasonably well known as a writer.But suddenly, every taxi driver knew who I was.

It felt like my character was being rewritten for me by this public hatred.”Over time, however, Rushdie went back to living like a well-regarded novelist around town.He could be spotted living it up with his then wife Padma Lakshmi and even did a cameo on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which he gave Larry David advice on how to handle the fatwa that had been leveled against him.

Clearly, Rushdie was comfortable with who he was and what he had gone through.“I actually stopped thinking [anything] would happen,” he told The Post.“I’ve been living in New York since the year 2000 and I’ve done probably hundreds of public events in that time without there ever being any ...