NEW YORK, United States —
Salman Rushdie,
who spent years in hiding after an Iranian fatwa ordered his killing, was on a
ventilator and could lose an eye following a stabbing attack at a literary
event in New York state Friday.
اضافة اعلان
The British author of “The Satanic Verses”, which
sparked fury among some Muslims who believed it was blasphemous, had to be
airlifted to hospital for emergency surgery following the attack.
His agent said in a statement obtained by The New
York Times that “the news is not good.”
“Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his
arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” said agent Andrew
Wylie, who added that Rushdie could not speak.
Carl LeVan, an
American University politics
professor attending the literary event, told AFP that the assailant had rushed
onto the stage where Rushdie was seated and “stabbed him repeatedly and
viciously”.
Several people ran to the stage and took the suspect
to the ground before a trooper present at the event arrested him. A doctor in
the audience administered medical care until emergency first responders
arrived.
New York state police identified the suspected
attacker as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from Fairfield, New Jersey, adding that
he stabbed Rushdie in the neck as well as the abdomen.
The motive for the stabbing remains unclear.
An interviewer onstage, 73-year-old Ralph Henry
Reese, suffered a facial injury but has been released from hospital, police
said.
The attack took place at the Chautauqua Institution,
which hosts arts programs in a tranquil lakeside community south of Buffalo
city.
“What many of us witnessed today was a violent
expression of hate that shook us to our core,” the Chautauqua Institution said
in a statement.
LeVan, a Chautauqua regular, said the suspect “was
trying to stab him as many times as possible before he was subdued”, adding
that he believed the man “was trying to kill” Rushdie”.
A decade in hiding
Rushdie, 75, was propelled
into the spotlight with his second novel “Midnight’s Children” in 1981, which
won international praise and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its
portrayal of post-independence India.
But his 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” transformed
his life when Iran’s first supreme leader
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a
fatwa, or religious decree, ordering his killing.
The novel was considered by some Muslims as
disrespectful of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed.
Rushdie, who was born in India to non-practicing
Muslims and identifies as an atheist, was forced to go underground as a bounty
was put on his head.
He was granted police protection by the government
in Britain, where he was at school and where he made his home, following the
murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.
He spent nearly a decade in hiding, moving houses
repeatedly and being unable to tell even his children where he lived.
Rushdie only began to emerge from his life on the
run in the late 1990s after Iran in 1998 said it would not support his
assassination.
Now living in New York, he is an advocate of freedom
of speech, notably launching a strong defense of French satirical magazine
Charlie Hebdo after its staff were gunned down by Islamists in Paris in 2015.
An ‘essential voice’
Threats and boycotts
continue against literary events that Rushdie attends, and his knighthood by
Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 sparked protests in Iran and Pakistan, where a
government minister said the honor justified suicide bombings.
The fatwa and other threats failed to stifle
Rushdie’s writing and inspired his memoir “Joseph Anton”, named after his
alias, while in hiding and written in the third person.
Suzanne Nossel, head of the PEN America
organization, said the free speech advocacy group was “reeling from shock and
horror.”
“Just hours before the attack, on Friday morning,
Salman had emailed me to help with placements for Ukrainian writers in need of
safe refuge from the grave perils they face,” Nossel said in a statement.
“Our thoughts and passions now lie with our dauntless
Salman, wishing him a full and speedy recovery. We hope and believe fervently
that his essential voice cannot and will not be silenced.”
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