After hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak Friday night after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an attack on freedom of expression. “The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, his book agent, wrote in an email. “Salman will probably lose one of his eyes, the nerves in his hand were severed and his liver was stabbed and destroyed.” Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Rushdie, 75, was introduced to give a speech to an audience of hundreds about artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Foundation in western New York when a man rushed the stage and tackled the novelist, who lives with a bounty on his head from recent years. 1980s. Stunned bystanders helped pull the man off Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor. An NYPD trooper providing security at the event arrested the assailant. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who purchased a pass to the event. “A guy jumped on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like he was punching him in the chest, repeatedly punching him in the chest and neck,” said Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience. “People were screaming, yelling and gasping.” A doctor in the audience treated Rushdie while emergency services arrived, police said. Henry Rees, the coordinator of the event, suffered a minor head injury. Police said they are working with federal investigators to determine a motive. They did not describe the weapon used. White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called the incident “disgusting”. “We are grateful to the good citizens and first responders who helped him so quickly,” he tweeted. Rushdie, who was born into a Kashmiri Muslim family in Mumbai, now Mumbai, before moving to the UK, is facing death threats over his fourth novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’. Some Muslims said the book contained blasphemous passages. It was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations after its publication in 1988. A few months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy. Rushdie, who called his novel “very bland,” went into hiding for nearly a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was assassinated in 1991. The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer support the fatwa, and Rushdie lived relatively openly in recent years. Iranian organizations, some linked to the government, have put up millions of dollars in reward money for Rushdie’s assassination. And Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as recently as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.” A general view shows the UPMC Hamot Surgery Center, where novelist Salman Rushdie is being treated after the attack, in Erie, Pennsylvania, U.S., August 12, 2022. REUTERS/Quinn Glabicki read more The semi-official Fars news agency and other Iranian news outlets donated money in 2016 to increase the bonus by $600,000. Fars called Rushdie an apostate who “insulted the prophet” in its report on Friday’s attack.
“NO ORDINARY WRITER”
Rushdie published a memoir in 2012 about his closeted, secret life under the fatwa called “Joseph Anton,” the pseudonym he used while under British police protection. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize. His new novel “City of Victory” is due out in February. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was disappointed that Rushdie was “stabbed while exercising a right we must never stop defending”. Rushdie was at the foundation in western New York for a discussion about the United States granting asylum to exiled artists and “as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the foundation’s website. There were no obvious security checks at the Chautauqua Institution, a landmark established in the 19th century in the small lakeside town of the same name. Staff simply checked people’s passes for entry, those present said. “I felt we needed more protection there because Salman Rushdie is not an ordinary writer,” said Anour Rahmani, an Algerian writer and human rights activist who was in the audience. “He is an author with a fatwa against him.” Michael Hill, president of the foundation, said at a news conference that they had a practice of working with state and local police to provide event security. He vowed that the summer program would resume soon. “Our whole purpose is to help people bridge what has been very divisive in a world,” Hill said. “The worst thing Chautauqua could do is walk away from its mission in light of this tragedy, and I don’t think Mr. Rushdie would want that either.” Rushdie became a US citizen in 2016 and lives in New York. A self-described apostate Muslim and “hard-line atheist,” he has been a vocal critic of religion across the spectrum and outspoken about oppression in his native India, including under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. PEN America, a free speech advocacy group of which Rushdie is a former president, said it was “crazy with shock and horror” at an unprecedented attack on a writer in the United States. read more “Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades, but he never flinched or faltered,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive, said in the statement. Earlier in the morning, Rushdie emailed her to help relocate Ukrainian writers seeking refuge, she said. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington, Jonathan Allen, Randi Love and Tyler Clifford in New York and Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru. Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols, Andrew Hay and Costas Pitas. Editing by Alistair Bell, Daniel Wallis and Michael Perry Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
