Not unlikely, because writers have this uncanny ability to irritate people. Suetonius mentions a historian who characterised Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius, as "the last of the Romans". The historian was executed without delay, his books destroyed, his body flung into the Tiber. Competitions in Latin prose held in the amphitheatre at Lyons required the losing contestants to erase their writing with their tongues. Authors too slow to make the correction were decapitated and flung into the Rhone.

Perhaps writers are obnoxious for the same reason you hate your friend if he tells in the morning what you did when you were drunk the night before. They can be sheer embarrassment. Karl Marx claims that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody has a philosophy. The material world is shaped by the spiritual as thesis chases antithesis to culminate in synthesis. The dynamics of life is thought followed by action, and writers often embarrass people by telling that they have missed that connection.

The people who stabbed the writer missed that connection, no doubt. They didn't think before action, perhaps blindly following what they were told. After all the hand, which plunged the knife into the victim's body, came at the end of a network where some people did the thinking and others took action. We don't know if the assailants were ideological killers or hired assassins. One group kills to believe and another believes to kill.

The question is which group has stabbed the writer? If it was a group, which was paid to kill, we can understand. It's occupational hazard for the writer and professional call for the attackers. If the other group, meaning the ideological killers, has done the job, we have a problem. Those who kill for living don't have to worry about right and wrong. They knowingly do the wrong thing for the right reason; it's livelihood to them.

But what about those who kill to right the wrong, to rescue truth and justice like commandos rescue hostages? Almost everything, as Thomas De Quincy noticed, has either a moral handle or an aesthetic handle. Which handle was used when they stabbed the writer? How were they convinced to act as the executive arm of some thinking men, who gave the order?

We get pushed back to the Marxian belief once again. Everybody has a philosophy and everybody has a thought process. It's obvious that the writer's philosophy clashed with the philosophy of his attackers, if the attack was at all ideologically and politically motivated. But then we must realise that people do strange things with their philosophy. Some take it to its logical conclusion and bring disaster. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge believed that intellectuals were public enemies and they concluded that everyone wearing glasses was an intellectual. They rounded up bespectacled people and executed them at random.

The Khmer Rouge also believed that money was the source of all corruption and the cities were its breeding ground. The day they entered Phnom Penh, they started to drive out hordes of people, including patients in the hospitals. About three to four million Cambodians perished in that madness.

Perhaps, we have hit upon the right word at last. It is madness that explains what happened last Friday, when assailants must have leapt out of a dark corner to finish their job. People get stabbed in this country every day, and it happens in the material world where interests collide with interests. Politicians clash, religious leaders wrangle, businessmen bandy, fundamentalism, communism, secularism, all sorts of political groups confront each other in power struggle.

But for the first time since the intellectuals were killed in 1971, we are suspecting that the conflict may have arisen in the intellectual world where ideas clashed ideas, leading to bloodshed. May be, that is why the stabbing of a writer has made such waves in a country where murder and mayhem are as natural as air. May be that is why there has been so much outcry to denounce this atrocious act.

May be it has also frightened us by squeezing our mental space. We are used to thinking that the pen is mightier than the sword, and suddenly we are shell-shocked to find a butcher's knife more powerful than that. Norman Mailer, the American writer, once proposed a principle: "Culture is worth a little risk." Mailer was trying to defend a writer named Jack Abott who was convicted of murderer, and argued that the creativity of Abott would be wasted if put away in jail. He believed that the talent of a writer must be encouraged, even by overlooking his misdeeds. Mailer himself had stabbed his wife with a penknife in 1960 and got away with it.

What we saw was an opposite spin. Here someone or a group of people wanted to waste a writer for his writing. We all think the unthinkable, our minds treading the forbidden terrain of imagination ranging from sexual fantasies to life after death. But writers always go an extra mile and they write about what they think. The assailants who wielded that knife last Friday also come under similar category. They also thought the unthinkable, then went ahead and did it.

Except that they shed the blood of a cerebral man who expressed his thoughts in ink. It's amazing how it worked, how the words in his prose sent them into frenzy and they tried to kill him. What happened there? What was the connection? Why did his words get them so worried?

Because word goes deeper than knife and it hurts even more, when coming from a man of conviction. If the killers were enraged by the prose, it only shows that they were helpless like an ugly face looking at the mirror. The writers often step on the nerves of others by bringing them face to face with their own emptiness. In that respect the pen is mightier than the sword, because it defeats the enemy in his conviction, although, in frustration, he might still go on brandishing the sword.

The writer is recovering from his wounds, and we hope he will soon pick up the pen, and write again. But what will happen to those who attacked him? That depends on who stabbed him? If they were hired assassins, they will sleep it over until their next job. And then one day, they will either end up in jail or will be taken down by a rival gang.

What if they were ideological killers, those who kill for convictions? Tough luck for them, even if they aren't caught. Their wounds will fester long after the writer's wounds have healed, because the stain of ink lasts longer than the smear of blood.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.