Rushdie was stabbed as he was about to give a lecture in the western New York town of Chautauqua. A man jumped on stage and stabbed him several times, including in the neck and liver. According to his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, Rushdie can no longer speak, his liver is damaged and he is likely to lose one eye.
Rushdie had just been announced and was about to walk to the podium when the writer and his interviewer Henry Reese were attacked. A state trooper who was there to protect Rushdie immediately pulled the man off the writer. Spectators also rushed in, including a doctor, who stopped the bleeding while waiting for a helicopter to take Rushdie to a hospital.
The suspected perpetrator, identified by police as 24-year-old Hadi Madar from the city of Fairview, was overpowered and arrested.
Police have not yet said anything about the motive for the attack, but the action is believed to have a religious background. Rushdie had been under the threat of an Islamic attack for decades. In 1989, after the release of Rushdie’s book The Devil’s VersesIranian leader Ayatollah Khomeiny issued a fatwa against the writer and placed a $3 million reward on his head.
That fatwa, including the promised amount, has never been revoked. Under the threat of an attack, Rushdie had to keep his whereabouts secret for years, always surrounded by bodyguards at performances. Over the course of 33 years, security had gradually diminished, and Rushdie was eventually even able to lead a more or less normal life.
According to his new Dutch publisher Mizzi van der Pluijm, Rushdie has wrested himself out of it: ‘He had to do an awful lot to get out of that fatwa, he forced a life for himself that was livable for him. He’s always been tough in the way he handled it, he’s kept writing emphatically, performing, because if you don’t, they’ve won, he said.’
And now this, says Van der Pluijm. “Now the big question is: if he survives this, how will you live on? This must be horrible.’
Rushdie broke through as a writer with the book Midnight’s Children, which won him the Booker Prize in 1981. In 1988 he released the book The Devil’s Verses in which he plays with themes from the Quran. That immediately sparked a storm of protest in the Islamic world, and eventually Khomeini’s fatwa that would make Rushdie’s life hell for years to come.
Rushdie always maintained contacts in the literary world, and traveled all over the world. He also had regular contact with Dutch writers, including Adriaan van Dis. Van Dis put himself in the Rushdie Defense Committee Netherlands committed to Rushdie for years. Van Dis shows himself on Friday evening in a reaction in the AD shocked by the attack: ‘It turns out that there is still a madman walking around who wants to catch 3 million dollars.’