Salman Rushdie Alive, NY Governor Says. Assailant in Custody

Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who spent years in hiding after death threats from Iran because of his writing, was stabbed in the neck onstage at a lecture in New York state on Friday and airlifted to a hospital, police said.

He was alive and “getting the care he needs,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said.

A man rushed to the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and attacked Rushdie, 75, as he was being introduced to give a talk on artistic freedom to an audience of hundreds, an eyewitness said. A New York State Police trooper present at the event took the attacker into custody, police said.

State police said the condition of Rushdie, who wrote the novel “The Satanic Verses,” was not known and did not give a motive for the attack and it was not clear what kind of weapon was used.

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Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in Bombay, now known as Mumbai, before moving to the United Kingdom, has faced death threats for his fourth novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims said contained blasphemous passages. The novel was banned in many countries with large Muslim populations upon its 1988 publication.

A year later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in its publication for blasphemy.

Rushdie, who called his novel “pretty mild,” went into hiding for many years. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was murdered in 1991. {snip}

Iranian organizations, some affiliated with the government, have raised a bounty worth millions of dollars for Rushdie’s murder. And Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said as late as 2017 that the fatwa was still valid.

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Rushdie was at the Chautauqua Institution to take part in a discussion about the United States serving as asylum for writers and artists in exile and “as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the institution’s website.

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