Salman Rushdie stabbed on stage in New York: the author of ‘The Satanic Verses’ attacked after 33 years of threats

CHAUTAUQUA — Salman Rushdie, the novelist who has lived under threat of death for more than three decades over his novel “The Satanic Verses”, was stabbed on stage on Friday morning as he prepared to give a lecture in western New York State. He was airlifted to hospital; his agent said he was on a ventilator and could lose an eye.

The attack happened in seconds. A man rushed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution, where Rushdie was to speak about the United States as a refuge for exiled writers, and stabbed him repeatedly in the neck and abdomen before being restrained by members of the audience. The event’s moderator was also injured. A 24-year-old man from New Jersey was arrested at the scene.

Rushdie, 75, has lived with this possibility since 14 February 1989, when Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death over passages of “The Satanic Verses” deemed blasphemous. The book’s Japanese translator was murdered, its Italian translator and Norwegian publisher were attacked, and Rushdie spent a decade in hiding under police protection.

In recent years he had lived openly and without guards in New York, saying the danger had receded. Friday’s attack — at one of America’s most genteel venues, a lakeside summer colony of lectures and concerts — shattered that assumption in front of hundreds of witnesses.

Messages of solidarity arrived from writers and leaders across the world within hours. Whatever the suspect’s motive, the attack is already being read for what it cannot help but be: an assault on the principle that books may offend, and writers may go on living.

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