Salman Rushdie, world famous author of the book The Satanic Verses and target for more than 30 years of a fatwa from Iran, was placed on a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck by a man at a literary conference in upstate New York.
His state of health is currently “not known”, state police said, but Governor Kathy Hochul assured that the writer was “alive”.
The 75-year-old intellectual was immediately transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery, his agent Andrew Wylie told American media. “The news is not good,” he said at the start of the evening. “Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was damaged. »
Around 11 a.m., “a suspect rushed to the scene [de l’amphithéâtre] and attacked Salman Rushdie and an interviewer,” New York State Police said in a statement on Friday.
She immediately arrested the attacker and took him into custody without saying anything about his identity and motive.
Mr. Rushdie was preparing to give a literary lecture in the amphitheater of the cultural center of Chautauqua, a small town 100 km from Buffalo, near Lake Erie, when he was attacked. The person who was to give the floor to the writer was also “slightly injured in the head”, according to the police.
“Killing Salman Rushdie”
Carl LeVan, professor of political science, was in the room, and said on the phone that a man rushed to the stage where Mr Rushdie was sitting and “stabbed him violently several times”.
The assailant “was trying to kill Salman Rushdie”, said this witness.
Videos circulating on social media show the scene, along with Mr Rushdie being evacuated on a stretcher.
Salman Rushdie was taken to the hospital by medical helicopter.
Author Salman Rushdie was stabbed after taking stage at a Chautauqua Institute event.This man has been detained by police.-#NYPD#SalmanRushdie #New York pic.twitter.com/M2xt3nicbh
— Chaudhary Parvez (@ChaudharyParvez) August 12, 2022
Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence, into a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals who were wealthy, progressive and cultured. He had set part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of satanic versesleading the Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue in 1989 a fatwa demanding his assassination.
The author had therefore been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache. He must face immense loneliness, increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom The verses are dedicated.
Living discreetly in New York, Salman Rushdie – arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard – had resumed an almost normal life while continuing to defend satire and irreverence in his books.
But the fatwa was never lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks, even killed, such as the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stab wounds in 1991.
“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], 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 chagrin of Muslim extremists, this master of magical realism, a man of immense culture who calls himself apolitical, has written in English about fifteen novels, stories for young people, short stories and essays. .
British Prime Minister ‘appalled’
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the attack. I am ‘appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right we should never stop defending’: freedom of speech, he wrote on Twitter.
The writers’ defense association 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 for Ukrainian writers”.
For her part, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul hailed “someone who has spent decades speaking truth to the powerful. […] who fearlessly exposed himself despite the threats that haunted him throughout his adult life.