Rushdie Remains Critical, Literary World Condemn the Attack

Manas Dasgupta

NEW DELHI, Aug 13: The condition of the celebrated Indian-origin British author Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed at a literary event in New York on Friday, “is not good” and is still on a ventilator and could lose an eye, hospital sources said.

The 75-year old Mumbai born author who spent years in hiding after an Iranian fatwa ordered his killing, was repeatedly stabbed on stage while he was being introduced at the event of the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York.

New York state police identified the suspected attacker as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from Fairfield, New Jersey, adding that he stabbed Rushdie in the neck as well as the abdomen. Carl LeVan, an American University politics professor attending the literary event, said the assailant had rushed onto the stage where Rushdie was seated and “stabbed him repeatedly and viciously.”

The bloodied British author of “The Satanic Verses”, which sparked fury among some Muslims who believed it was blasphemous, had to be airlifted to hospital for emergency surgery following the attack. His agent said in a statement that “the news is not good.” “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged,” said agent Andrew Wylie, who added that Rushdie could not speak. A physician who was among those who rushed to help Rushdie after he was stabbed at a New York state book event told the news agency AP that the author’s wounds are “serious but recoverable.” An interviewer onstage, 73-year-old Ralph Henry Reese, suffered a facial injury but has been released from hospital, police said.

The attack took place at the Chautauqua Institution, which hosts arts programmes in a tranquil lakeside community 110 km south of Buffalo city. The police could not give the cause for the attack on Rushdie but believed it was linked to the “fatwa” since Hadi Matar was “sympathetic to Iran.”

Rushdie was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel “Midnight’s Children” in 1981, which won international praise and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India. But his 1988 book “The Satanic Verses” transformed his life since 1989 when Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a “fatwa” (religious decree) ordering his killing. The novel was considered by some Muslims as disrespectful of Islam and the Prophet Mohammad.

In July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was stabbed dead in Japan, and its Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was injured in a knife attack in Milan. In October 1993, the Norwegian publisher of ‘The Satanic Verses’, William Nygaard, was shot and wounded in Oslo.

In 1998, Iran’s then President Mohammad Khatami said his country no longer supported Rushdie killing. But the fatwa has not been officially withdrawn, and Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was quoted as saying a few years ago that the fatwa for Rushdie’s killing was “fired like a bullet that won’t rest until it hits its target”.

Media reports said analysis of the assailant Hadi Matar’s social media accounts by law enforcement showed him to be sympathetic to Shia extremism and the causes of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an ideologically-driven branch of the Iranian armed forces committed to protecting the country’s Islamic system from hostile foreign powers and internal dissensions.

NBC News reported that officers had found pictures of Qasem Soleimani, the charismatic former head of the Quds Force, a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who was assassinated by the US in Baghdad in January 2020, on a cell phone messaging app belonging to Matar. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other investigative agencies in the US are yet to make a statement on Matar’s motive. It is also not clear whether Matar himself has Iranian origins or nationality. Media reports quoted Major Eugene Staniszewski of the New York State Police as saying the suspect had a pass to the event grounds at Chautauqua Institution like other members of the audience.

Matar was born almost a decade after the fatwa to kill Rushdie was issued, and Ayatollah Khomeini himself passed away. The evidence in Matar’s cell phone linking him to the Revolutionary Guard, however, suggests that he may have been driven by the fatwa. ‘The Satanic Verses’ was banned in Iran in 1988. Many Muslims continue to be offended by the controversial passages in the book, and bounties have been announced for killing him from time to time, and the author has faced death threats for decades.

Born into a non-practicing Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay and identifies as an atheist, had moved to the UK. Rushdie was forced to go underground as a bounty was put on his head. He was granted police protection by the government in Britain, where he was at school and where he made his home, following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.

Global leaders voiced anger over the attack, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying the author “embodied freedom” and that “his battle is ours, a universal one.” British leader Boris Johnson said he was “appalled,” sending thoughts to Rushdie’s loved ones and praising the author for “exercising a right we should never cease to defend.”

“I also read about it. This is something that the whole world has noticed and the whole world has reacted to such an attack,” External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on the attack on Rushdie.

In 2001, Rushdie publicly complained about having too much security around him. While attending the Prague Writers’ Festival, he told reporters, “To be here and to find a large security operation around me has actually felt a little embarrassing… I thought it was really unnecessary and kind of excessive and was certainly not arranged at my request.”

“I spent a great deal of time before I came here saying that I really didn’t want that. So I was very surprised to arrive here and discover a really quite substantial operation, because it felt like being in a time warp, that I had gone back in time several years,” he was quoted as saying.

Following the attack on Friday, questions were raised about the security precautions — or lack thereof — at the New York’s Chautauqua Institution, the host institution, which sits in a rural lake resort about 110 km south of Buffalo, New York. The institution’s leadership had rejected recommendations for basic security measures, including bag checks and metal detectors, fearing that would create a divide between speakers and the audience. The leadership also feared that it would change the culture at the institution, the sources said.

Meanwhile, hours after the attack on Rushdie, K Natwar Singh, who was a Union minister in the Rajiv Gandhi government that banned Rushdie’s controversial book The Satanic Verses, strongly defended the decision on Saturday asserting it was taken “purely” for law and order reasons.

Senior member of All-India Muslim Personal Law Board Maulana Khalid Rasheed Farangi Mahali on Saturday said no one has the right to take law into his hand and the attack on controversial writer Salman Rushdie can’t be termed as correct. Mahali said Prophet Mohammed always gave the message of peace. “Hence, the Muslims should take the path shown by Him,” he said.

In an interview conducted just weeks before he was stabbed in New York, Rushdie had said his life was now “relatively normal”, after having lived in hiding for years because of death threats. He also called himself an optimist, and noted that the fatwa to kill him for blasphemy, was pronounced long ago.

The interview was due to appear in the magazine on August 18 but it was released on Saturday, a day after he faced the attack. The interview was conducted about two weeks ago, the magazine’s editorial office said.