Rushdie, a self-described “hard-line atheist” and lapsed Muslim, has been a staunch critic of persecution in his native India, notably under the Hindu-nationalist administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday, Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born author who spent years in exile when Iran asked Muslims to murder him because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck and torso. He was then rushed to a hospital, according to police. Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to talk on Friday night following an attack that was denounced by authors and politicians throughout the world as an attack on the right to free speech.
At the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, Rushdie, 75, was being presented to speak to a large crowd on artistic freedom when a guy rushed the stage and lunged at the author, who has had a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.
The assailant was detained by a trooper from the New York State Police, who was on duty to provide protection. Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident from Fairview who purchased a ticket to the event, was identified by police as the suspect.
HISTORY
Before relocating to the UK, Rushdie was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now Mumbai, and has long received death threats for his fourth book, “The Satanic Verses.” The book, according to some Muslims, contains blasphemous parts. Upon its release in 1988 in a number of nations with sizable Muslim populations, it was outlawed.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran at the time, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, a few months later, urging Muslims to execute the writer and anybody involved in the book’s publication for blasphemy.
Rushdie, who referred to his book as “pretty mild,” spent almost ten years in hiding. The novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was assassinated in 1991. Rushdie has been living relatively freely in recent years since the Iranian government said in 1998 that it would no longer support the fatwa.
Millions of dollars have been raised as part of a bounty for Rushdie’s assassination by Iranian groups, some of which are government-affiliated. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, also declared the fatwa to be “irrevocable” in 2019.
In 2016, donations totaling $600,000 were made by the semi-official Fars News Agency of Iran and other media outlets to raise the bounty. In their article on the incident on Friday, Fars referred to Rushdie as an apostate who “insulted the prophet.”
Image Credit: Vogue
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