Urgently operated on after being stabbed, Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator and cannot speak. “The news is not good. Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; his liver was stabbed and damaged,” his agent Andrew Wylie told the media Friday night.
Salman Rushdie was about to give a talk in Chautauqua, in western New York, when a man attacked him with a knife. British author Salman Rushdie was stabbed on Friday, Chautauqua County police confirmed to AFP. The interviewer accompanying him on stage suffered a minor head injury. The alleged attacker has been arrested. The author was taken to hospital by helicopter.
Several hundred people were gathered in this conference center, where Rushdie had already intervened in the past. They were removed from the room. “The most terrible event has just happened at the Chautauqua Institution – Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage. The amphitheater is evacuated, ”wrote a witness on social networks. Video images posted on social networks show spectators in a theater rushing on stage to help someone seen on the ground.
Bounty head
By publishing the controversial book satanic verses, Rushdie became the target of a fatwa from Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. A bounty of $3 million was then offered to anyone who killed the writer.
Yet the author, born in 1947 in Bombay, India, two months before its independence from the British Empire, tries not to be reduced to the scandal caused by the publication of this book, which had set the Muslim world ablaze and led in 1989 to a “fatwa” calling for his assassination.
“My problem is that people continue to see me through the sole prism of the fatwa,” said this free-thinker who wants to be a writer, not a symbol, a few years ago. Forced from then on to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache, he called himself Joseph Anton, in homage to his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. He has to face an immense loneliness, further increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom “Les verses…” is dedicated.
Settled in New York for a few years, Salman Rushdie – arched eyebrows, heavy eyelids, bald head, glasses and beard – had resumed an almost normal life while continuing to defend, in his books, satire and irreverence.
Multiple reactions
“For 33 years, Salman Rushdie has embodied freedom and the fight against obscurantism. Hate and barbarism have just struck him, cowardly”, affirmed the French head of state on Twitter, affirming that “his fight is ours, universal”.
“It is a symbol of resistance against Islamist totalitarianism that has been attacked,” reacted on Twitter the president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella. “This attack proves that the Islamists will never disarm,” added the mayor of Perpignan Louis Aliot, candidate for the head of the National Rally.
“The religious fanatics who launched a fatwa against him undoubtedly bear the responsibility,” vilified the Insoumis MP Alexis Corbière. “Stabbed by Islamist hatred”, castigated the communist leader Fabien Roussel. Boris Vallaud, leader of the Socialist deputies condemned a “serious and intolerable” attack. “It is freedom that is under attack”, lambasted the president of the environmental group in the Assembly Julien Bayou, speaking of a “despicable fatwa”. For former right-wing presidential candidate Valérie Pécresse, Salman Rushdie “embodies freedom of expression in the face of Islamist totalitarians”.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled” by the attack on Friday against his compatriot the writer Salman Rushdie in the United States. I am ” appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that we should never stop defending, ” Johnson reacted in a tweet, referring to freedom of expression. “I am thinking of his loved ones. We all hope he is well,” added the head of government.