“The news is not good.” British writer Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, was stabbed in the neck and abdomen in Chautauqua, New York state, United States, on Friday and was placed on life support. “Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed and he was stabbed in the liver,” his agent Andrew Wylie told the New York Times on Saturday, Aug. 13.
The attack happened on the stage of an amphitheater of a cultural center. “A suspect rushed to the scene and assaulted Salman Rushdie and the interviewer,” police were quick to reveal. Struck in the neck, Salman Rushdie was also “stabbed in the stomach,” the order’s fordres said on Friday evening. After the attack, the writer was immediately transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. Conference host Ralph Henry Reese, 73, was “minorly injured in the face”.
The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody. As the New York police revealed in the evening, his name was Hadi Matar. The 24-year-old comes from the state of New Jersey.
“His fight is ours, more universal,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted, affirming that he was “at his side today more than ever.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right we should never stop defending”, referring to freedom of expression. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, speaking through his spokesman, said he was “appalled” by the attack, adding “the violence was in no way a response to words”.
Born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India, Salman Rushdie grew up in a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals who were wealthy, progressive, and cultured. He had incited part of the Muslim world to publish the Satanic verses, and the Iranian ayatollah, Rouhollah Khomeini, had issued a “fatwa” in 1989 calling for his assassination. The author was therefore forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache.
The “fatwa” was never rescinded and many of the translators of his book were injured in attacks, even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of multiple stabbings in 1991. Knighted by the Queen of England in 2007, angered by Muslim extremists, these masters of magical realism, a man of immense culture who describes himself as apolitical, wrote some fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and essays in English.