Writer Salman Rushdie, the target for more than 30 years of Iran’s fatwa for ‘The Satanic Verses’, was stabbed in the neck on Friday by a man at a literary conference in New York state. His state of health is not known at this time.
But New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the 75-year-old British author was “alive”. Immediately after the attack on the stage of an amphitheater of a cultural center, he was transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital where he was operated on urgently, his agent said on Twitter.
Around 11:00 a.m. (5:00 p.m. in Switzerland), “a suspect rushed to the scene and attacked Rushdie and an interviewer,” the NYSP, the New York State Police, said in a statement. The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody.
Mr. Rushdie was preparing to give a literary lecture in the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution cultural center. The person who was to give the floor to the writer was also ‘slightly injured in the head’, according to the police.
Stabbed multiple times
Carl LeVan, a political science professor, was in the room, and told AFP over the phone that a man rushed to the stage where Mr Rushdie was sitting and ‘stabbed him violently repeatedly ‘. The assailant was ‘trying to kill Salman Rushdie’, said this witness.
Born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence, Salman Rushdie was raised by a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals who were wealthy, progressive and cultured. He had inflamed part of the Muslim world with the publication of the ‘Satanic Verses’, leading Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue a ‘fatwa’ in 1989 calling for his assassination.
The author had therefore been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache. He has to face immense loneliness, increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom ‘Les verses…’ is dedicated.
Living discreetly in New York, Salman Rushdie had resumed a more or less normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence. But the ‘fatwa’ was never lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks or even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stab wounds in 1991.
Johnson ‘appalled’
“Thirty years have passed,” he said, however, in the fall of 2018. “Now everything is fine. I was 41 at the time [de la fatwa, ndlr]. I’m 71 now. We live in a world where issues of concern change very quickly. There are now many other reasons to be afraid, other people to kill…’.
Knighted in 2007 by the Queen of England, to the great displeasure of Muslim extremists, this master of magical realism, a man of immense culture who calls himself apolitical, has written in English some fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and trials.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the attack. I am ‘appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that we should never stop defending’, he wrote on Twitter in reference to freedom of expression.
The association for the defense of writers around the world, PEN America, also said it was ‘shocked and horrified’ when it revealed that Mr Rushdie had written to them on Friday morning to offer his ‘help to Ukrainian writers’.
For her part, Governor Hochul hailed ‘someone who has spent decades telling the truth to the powerful […] who fearlessly exposed himself despite the threats that haunted him throughout his adult life.
/ATS
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