Stabbed on stage | Author Salman Rushdie underwent emergency surgery

(New York) Salman Rushdie, world famous author of the book The Satanic Verses and target for more than 30 years of a fatwa from Iran, underwent emergency surgery on Friday after being stabbed in the neck by an arrested man at a literary conference in New York state.

His state of health is currently “not known”, said the New York State Police (NYSP) but Governor Kathy Hochul assured that the British writer was “alive”.

Immediately after the assault on the dais of an amphitheater at a cultural center in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, Mr. Rushdie was airlifted by helicopter to the nearest hospital where he had emergency surgery, his agent Andrew Wylie said on Twitter.

He promised to give regular updates on the 75-year-old intellectual who has lived in New York for several years.

“Stabbed in the neck”

Around 11 a.m., “a suspect rushed onto the stage (of an amphitheater) and attacked Salman Rushdie and an interviewer,” the NYSP announced very quickly in a press release.

The police immediately arrested the attacker and took him into custody without disclosing his identity and motive.

Mr. Rushdie was preparing to give a literary lecture in the amphitheater of the Chautauqua Institution cultural center, a small town 100 km from Buffalo near Lake Erie which separates the United States from Canada.

The person who was to give the floor to the writer was also “slightly injured in the head”, according to the police.

Carl LeVan, professor of political science, was in the room, and told AFP on the phone that a man rushed to the stage where Mr Rushdie was sitting and “stabbed him violently several times “.

“Killing Salman Rushdie”

The assailant “was trying to kill Salman Rushdie”, said this witness.

Salman Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence – raised by a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals, wealthy, progressive and cultured – set part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of satanic versesleading 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 an 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 – arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard – 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, 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 (of the 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 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.

Johnson ‘appalled’

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 in 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.