Novelist Salman Rushdie on ventilator after New York stabbing

Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after Iran urged Muslims to kill him due to his writing, was stabbed within the neck and torso onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and airlifted to a hospital, police stated.

After hours of surgical procedure, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to talk on Friday night after an assault condemned by writers and politicians around the globe as an assault on freedom of expression.

“The news is not good,” Andrew Wylie, his ebook agent, wrote in an electronic mail. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

Rushdie, 75, was being launched to provide a chat to an viewers of lots of on creative freedom at western New York’s Chautauqua Institution when a person rushed to the stage and lunged on the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head because the late Eighties.

Stunned attendees helped wrest the person from Rushdie, who had fallen to the ground. A New York State Police trooper offering safety on the occasion arrested the attacker. Police recognized the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who purchased a cross to the occasion.

“A man jumped up on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck,” stated Bradley Fisher, who was within the viewers. “People were screaming and crying out and gasping.”

A physician within the viewers helped are likely to Rushdie whereas emergency providers arrived, police stated. Henry Reese, the occasion’s moderator, suffered a minor head harm. Police stated they had been working with federal investigators to find out a motive. They didn’t describe the weapon used.

READ | Author Salman Rushdie stabbed 10-15 occasions, claims eyewitness | Top Points

Rushdie, who was born right into a Muslim Kashmiri household in Bombay, now Mumbai, earlier than shifting to the United Kingdom, has lengthy confronted demise threats for his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses.” Some Muslims stated the ebook contained blasphemous passages. It was banned in lots of international locations with giant Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.

A couple of months later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme chief, pronounced a fatwa, or spiritual edict, calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anybody concerned within the ebook’s publication for blasphemy.

Rushdie, who known as his novel “pretty mild,” went into hiding for almost a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991. The Iranian authorities stated in 1998 it might not again the fatwa, and Rushdie has lived comparatively overtly lately.

Iranian organizations, some affiliated with the federal government, have raised a bounty value hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for Rushdie’s homicide. And Khomeini’s successor as supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated as not too long ago as 2019 that the fatwa was “irrevocable.”

Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency and different information retailers donated cash in 2016 to extend the bounty by $600,000. Fars known as Rushdie an apostate who “insulted the prophet” in its report on Friday’s assault.

READ | Author Salman Rushdie, stabbed in New York, usually pressured to reside on the run

‘NOT A USUAL WRITER’

Rushdie printed a memoir in 2012 about his cloistered, secretive life underneath the fatwa known as “Joseph Anton,” the pseudonym he used whereas in British police safety. His second novel, “Midnight’s Children,” gained the Booker Prize. His new novel “Victory City” is because of be printed in February.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson stated he was appalled that Rushdie was “stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend.”

Rushdie was on the establishment in western New York for a dialogue concerning the United States giving asylum to artists in exile and “as a home for freedom of creative expression,” in accordance with the establishment’s web site.

There had been no apparent safety checks on the Chautauqua Institution, a landmark based within the nineteenth century within the small lakeside city of the identical title; employees merely checked individuals’s passes for admission, attendees stated.

“I felt like we needed to have more protection there because Salman Rushdie is not a usual writer,” stated Anour Rahmani, an Algerian author and human rights activist who was within the viewers. “He’s a writer with a fatwa against him.”

READ | ‘Barbaric, surprising’: Voices in solidarity with Salman Rushdie

Michael Hill, the establishment’s president, stated at a information convention they’d a observe of working with state and native police to offer occasion safety. He vowed the summer season’s program would quickly proceed.

“Our whole purpose is to help people bridge what has been too divisive of a world,” Hill stated. “The worst thing Chautauqua could do is back away from its mission in light of this tragedy, and I don’t think Mr. Rushdie would want that either.”

Rushdie turned a US citizen in 2016 and lives in New York City.

A self-described lapsed Muslim and “hard-line atheist,” he has been a fierce critic of faith throughout the spectrum and outspoken about oppression in his native India, together with underneath the Hindu-nationalist authorities of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

PEN America, an advocacy group for freedom of expression of which Rushdie is a former president, stated it was “reeling from shock and horror” at what it known as an unprecedented assault on a author within the United States.

“Salman Rushdie has been targeted for his words for decades but has never flinched nor faltered,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief govt, stated within the assertion. Earlier within the morning, Rushdie had emailed her to assist with relocating Ukrainian writers in search of refuge, she stated.

WATCH | Salman Rushdie being airlifted to hospital after he was stabbed in New York

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