British writer Salman Rushdie, whose texts made him the target of Iranian death threats, is on a respirator and might lose an eye following being stabbed multiple times this Friday at a literary event in upstate New York.
After the attack, which occurred shortly before 11:00 local time (15:00 GMT), Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital where he underwent emergency surgery.
“The news is not good,” his agent, Andrew Wylie, later told The New York Times. “Salman will probably lose an eye, the nerves in his arm were severed and his liver was stabbed and he is damaged,” she said.
The writer was giving a lecture in the amphitheater of a cultural center in Chautauqa, a town in northwestern New York state, when he was attacked.
Stabbed in the neck and abdomen
Police immediately arrested the assailant, whom they identified as Hadi Matar, 24, of Fairfield, New Jersey, without detailing his motives.
Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and abdomen, the institution said. Attendees to the event pounced on the aggressor before he was stopped by a police officer present at the scene.
A doctor administered first aid to the writer before the emergency services arrived. And an interviewer who was onstage, Ralph Henry Reese, 73, suffered a facial injury but was released from the hospital.
Carl LeVan, a political science professor who witnessed the attack, told AFP by phone that a man lunged onto the stage while Rushdie was sitting, “vigorously stabbed him multiple times” and “tried to kill him.”
A hidden decade
Rushdie, 75, rose to fame with his second novel children of midnight in 1981, which garnered international acclaim and the UK’s prestigious Booker Prize for its depiction of post-independence India.
But his 1988 book the satanic verses had a strong impact by causing a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for his death by the Iranian revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The novel was considered by some Muslims to be disrespectful to the Prophet Muhammad.
Rushdie, born in 1947 in Bombay into a family of non-practicing Muslims and a declared atheist, was forced to live in hiding when a bounty was offered for his head that is still valid.
The UK government, where he studied and made his home, gave him police protection following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.
He spent nearly a decade in hiding, constantly moving houses and unable to tell his children where he lived.
He only began to come out of hiding in the late 1990s, following Iran said in 1998 that it would not support his assassination.
He currently lives in New York and is a strong advocate for freedom of expression. He made a strong defense of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo following a group of Islamists killed part of its staff in Paris in 2015.
The magazine had published drawings of Muhammad that provoked furious reactions among Muslims around the world.
“Essential Voice”
Threats and boycotts persist once morest the literary events Rushdie attends. His knighthood in 2007 sparked protests in Iran and Pakistan, where a government minister said it justified suicide bombings.
But the fatwa failed to silence Rushdie and inspired his memoirs Joseph Anton, the name of his alias while in hiding, which are written in the third person.
Rushdie’s books were translated into more than 40 languages and his novel children of midnightwhich is over 600 pages long, has been adapted for theater and film.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “horrified” by what happened.
The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, showed his support for the writer. “For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight once morest obscurantism. Hate and barbarism just cowardly hit him,” he tweeted. “His combat is ours, universal.”
Suzanne Nossel, director in the United States of the PEN organization, which advocates for freedom of expression, highlighted her support for the “intrepid Salman”, wishing him “a full and speedy recovery”.
“Just hours before the attack, on Friday morning, Salman emailed me to help with the locations of Ukrainian writers who need a safe haven from the grave dangers they face,” Nossel said in a statement.
“Your essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”
