British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator and is likely to lose an eye. His literary agent Andrew Wylie told Reuters news agency. Rushdie was stabbed Friday at an event in Chautauqua, New York.
“The news is not good,” Wylie writes in an email to Reuters. “Salman will probably lose an eye, the nerves in his arm will be severed, and his liver will be hit and damaged.”
Just before Rushdie was about to start his lecture on Friday afternoon, a man stormed the stage and started beating and stabbing the writer. Rushdie was first treated onstage by a doctor who was in the room and later transferred to the hospital by helicopter.
Also read this interview by Bas Heijne with Salman Rushdie from 2012: ‘I was about to go crazy’
The police arrested the perpetrator immediately after the incident and announced late on Friday evening that it was a 24-year-old man from New Jersey. The suspect’s name is Hadi Matar and is believed to have acted alone. Police have not yet released any information about his motive.
Death Threats
Salman Rushdie, now 75, has been receiving death threats because of his book since the 1980s The Devil’s Verses. In it he had portrayed the prophet Mohammed as a human being of flesh and blood, which led to a fatwa, a call to kill him, from the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini.
Although the fatwa was lifted in 1998 by the then Iranian government, many Muslim extremists still believe that Rushdie deserves death.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Friday evening on Twitter to be “shocked” about the “terrible” attack on the writer. “What we always feared has now happened: being stabbed while exercising his fundamental right to free speech.”
Also the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseinic reacts “horrified” to the stabbing, calling Rushdie “an essential voice that cannot be silenced.”
US Senate Leader Chuck Schumer sees the incident as “an attack on freedom of expression” and emphasizes that it is “a fundamental value” in the United States. Rushdie became a US citizen in 2016.