The Indian-born author Salman Rushdie, who is 75 years old, was attacked on August 12 at the Chautauqua Summer Arts Festival in New York. In 1981, for his second book, Midnight’s Children, he won the Booker Prize.
Rushdie’s fourth book, Satanic Verses, caused a stir in 1989 because some Muslims thought it was offensive to their religion. India, Pakistan, and several other countries forbade people from reading the book.
The late Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree called a “fatwa” that called for Rushdie’s death and offered rewards for killing anyone who had anything to do with the book’s publication. The fatwa has not been officially taken away, so it is still in effect.
After this, Rushdie had to hide for ten years in a fortified safe house where the British government kept an eye on him. He moved to the US in 2000 and slowly started going out in public again. Victory City, his new book, will come out in February 2023.
We’ve put together a list of everything you need to know about the attack on Salman Rushdie.
Warning: This article talks about violence in very graphic ways.
On August 12, Salman Rushdie was supposed to speak at a Chautauqua Institution event in western New York. He and Henry Reese, who was leading the discussion, had just sat down onstage to talk about the U.S. giving asylum to artists in exile when the attacker rushed the stage and stabbed him several times in the neck and stomach.
Henry Reese, who is 73 years old and co-founded City of Asylum, a residency program in Pittsburgh for writers who have been forced to leave their homes, also got a small cut on his face during the attack. He was taken to a hospital nearby, where he was treated and sent home.
People at the event were so shocked that they didn’t know what to do. They tried to pull the attacker off of Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor, but the man was determined to keep attacking. Rushdie got first aid from Dr. Martin Haskell, a doctor who was also at the event.
Rushdie was taken to a nearby hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, by helicopter, where he had surgery that took several hours.
The attacker was caught by a New York State Police trooper who was there to keep the event safe. Major Eugene J. Staniszewski of the New York State Police named the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who had bought a ticket to the event.
Several news stories have said that the attacker is of Lebanese descent and that he shared views on social media that were supportive of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). When the attacker was brought into court on August 14, he was wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask. He had pleaded not guilty to the attempted murder and assault charges.
Salman Rushdie was put on a ventilator after several hours of surgery. He had been fighting to stay alive, and he couldn’t talk. Andrew Wylie, who was his agent, said:
“Salman will probably lose one eye. The nerves in his arm were cut, and he was stabbed in the liver, which was hurt.”
The conservative Iranian newspaper Kayhan, whose head is chosen by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the current supreme leader, praised the attacker:
“Bravo to this brave and duty-minded man who attacked Salman Rushdie in New York for being an apostate and a bad person. Let’s kiss the hands of the person who used a knife to cut the neck of God’s enemy.
The “neck of the devil” had been “cut with a razor,” according to another state-owned paper. But the Iranian government hasn’t said anything official about the attack yet.