Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born novelist who was ordered to be killed by Iran in 1989 due to his writing, was attacked on stage at an occasion in New York and suffered an obvious stab wound to the neck, in response to police. State of New York and an eyewitness. .
A person rushed the stage on the Chautauqua Institute in western New York state and attacked Rushdie as he launched himself to provide a speech on creative freedom, an eyewitness stated. A state worker current on the occasion arrested the attacker, the police stated.
Rushdie was airlifted to hospital, however his situation is just not but recognized, police stated. No motive for the assault is given within the police assertion.
Rushdie fell to the ground when the person attacked him, and was then surrounded by a small group of people that held his legs up, apparently to ship extra blood to his higher physique, because the attacker was restricted, in response to a witness who attended the lecture. who requested to not be named.
“We’re coping with an emergency state of affairs,” a spokesman for the Chautauqua Institute stated when contacted by Reuters.
Rushdie, who was born into an Indian Muslim household, has confronted loss of life threats over his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims stated contained blasphemous passages. The novel was banned in lots of international locations with massive Muslim populations after its publication in 1988.
A yr later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme chief, issued a fatwa, or spiritual decree, calling on Muslims to kill the novelist for blasphemy.
Rushdie went into hiding for a few years. The Iranian authorities stated in 1998 it might now not assist the fatwana, and Rushdie has lived comparatively brazenly in recent times. Iranian organizations, nevertheless, have collected a million-dollar bounty for Rushdie’s homicide.
Rushdie was on the Chautauqua Institute to take part in a dialogue about the USA’ service as an asylum for writers and artists in exile and “as a house for freedom of inventive expression,” in response to the establishment’s web site.
He turned a US citizen in 2016 and lives in New York Metropolis. He has been essential of oppression in his native India, together with below the Hindu-nationalist authorities of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The Wylie Company, which represents Rushdie, didn’t reply to a request for remark.
PEN America, a free-speech advocacy group of which Rushdie is a former president, stated it was “shocked and horrified” by what it referred to as an unprecedented assault on a author in the USA.
“Salman Rushdie has been focused for his phrases for many years, however he has by no means backed down or wavered,” Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief government, stated in an announcement. Earlier within the morning, Rushdie had emailed her to assist relocate Ukrainian writers looking for asylum, she stated.
US Senator Chuck Schumer of New York referred to as it “an assault on freedom of speech and thought”.
