The world in general, and the literary world in particular, is in shock. The writer Salman Rushdie, who for decades has lived under the threat of Iranian fundamentalism and protected by the police, was stabbed this Friday just as he was going to start a public reading in Chautauqua, in the state of New York.
Once his presentation was made, a man burst onto the stage and attacked the author of The Satanic Verses and the presenter. “Rushdie has suffered an apparent stab wound to the neck, his condition is unknown,” said police in the town, in the western part of the state, almost 700 kilometers from the Big Apple. A helicopter has taken him to a hospital.
A video has captured the moment in which the attack occurred, which left the victim lying on the ground, while various people from the public came to his aid. Police have arrested the assailant, a 24-year-old man.
“He is alive and has been transferred safely. The moderate was also attacked. They have the necessary care at a local hospital,” Governor Kathy Hochul tweeted, a message that has given a sense of hope amid concern for the health of those attacked.
One of the witnesses to the attack was Dr. Rita Landman. She has claimed that Rushdie has been stabbed multiple times, including one to the right side of the neck. This left a pool of blood under his body. People shouted “he has a pulse, he has a pulse”.
At this point in the investigation, the motive for the perpetrator of the attack cannot yet be established, but everything points to religious revenge. Despite the fact that the tension and threat that weighed on him since he published The Satanic Verses in the eighties, and that made Ayatollah Khomeini issue a “fatwa” or death call in 1989, he was still active the reward of three million dollars to whoever hunted him down. Many Muslims consider him a blasphemer.
Rushdie was born in India, in a Muslim family. He rose to fame with Midnight’s Children, the work with which he won the Booker Prize in 1981. However, it was his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, that caused him several headaches and the one that forced him to remain hidden during nine years
The novel has been banned in Iran since 1988, as many Muslims consider it blasphemous. A year later, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
The Iranian government eventually distanced itself from Khomeini’s ‘fatwa’, but in 2012 a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised Rushdie’s reward from $2.8 million to $3.3 million. The writer recounted precisely his suffering during the first years of the “fatwa” in his memoirs Joseph Anton, published in 2012. The title refers to the pseudonym the writer used while he remained in hiding.
Despite all the threats, the author has lived relatively openly in recent years. In fact, it was not the first time that he had given talks or participated in public debates, several of them in the same institution where the event took place.
