Salman Rushdie, whose book ‘The Satanic Verses’ made him the target of a fatwa in 1989, was stabbed in the neck on Friday by a man at a conference in New York state, police said American.
His condition is “not known” at this time, New York State Police (NYSP) said, but Governor Kathy Hochul said the British author was “alive”.
Around 11:00 a.m. (5:00 p.m. in Switzerland), ‘a suspect rushed onto the stage (of an amphitheater) and attacked (Salman) Rushdie and an interviewer. Salman Rushdie suffered an apparent neck injury after being stabbed and was airlifted to hospital by helicopter,’ the NYSP said in a statement, adding that the assailant was immediately arrested and taken into custody.
At a press briefing, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul hailed ‘someone who has spent decades telling the truth to the powerful…who has exposed himself without fear despite the threats that have pursued him his entire adult life.
Room evacuated
Mr. Rushdie, 75, was preparing to give a literary lecture in an amphitheater in Chautauqua, in northwestern New York State, 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.
The Chautauqua Institution, a cultural centre, said it had ‘coordinated with law enforcement and emergency services to respond to the public following today’s attack on Salman Rushdie’.
Witnesses in the amphitheater, including journalists, said on Twitter that the room was quickly ‘evacuated’. Photos and videos posted on social networks show spectators rushing to the stage to help someone seen on the ground, surrounded by several people.
immense loneliness
Salman Rushdie, born June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence, set the Muslim world ablaze 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.
Settled in New York for a few years, Salman Rushdie – arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard – had resumed an almost 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.
Boris Johnson ‘appalled’
“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.
The British Prime Minister said he was “appalled” by the attack on Friday. I am “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that we should never stop defending”, reacted Boris Johnson in a tweet, alluding to freedom of expression.
The association for the defense of writers around the world, PEN America, said it was ‘shocked and horrified’, its president Suzanne Nossel revealing that Mr Rushdie had written to her on Friday morning to offer his ‘help to Ukrainian writers’ .
/ATS