Salman Rushdie remained hospitalized in serious condition on Saturday after being stabbed at a literary event in New York state in a shocking assault that sparked international outrage but was applauded by hardliners in Iran and Pakistan.
The British author, who spent years under police protection after Iranian leaders ordered his assassination, underwent emergency surgery and was placed on a ventilator after Friday’s assault in which a 24-year-old Hadi Matar rushed the stage where Rushdie was about to give a lecture and stabbed him in the neck and abdomen.
Rushdie, 75, had been living under an effective death sentence since 1989, when Iran’s then-supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious decree, or fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill the writer
– Assaulter raised in the USA –
And security wasn’t particularly tight at Friday’s event at the Chautauqua institution, which hosts arts programs in a quiet lakeside community in western New York state.
An audience medic provided emergency first aid at the scene before Rushdie was airlifted to hospital in nearby Erie.
His family apparently came from a border town called Yaroun in southern Lebanon. An AFP reporter who visited the village on Saturday said Matar’s parents were divorced and his father, a shepherd, still lived there. Reporters who approached his father’s home were turned away.
Although Khomeini’s original fatwa has long since ceased to be part of daily discourse in Iran, the clerical leadership under his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did nothing to indicate that it no longer stood and sometimes emphasized that the decree was still valid.
In Pakistan, a spokesman for Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan — a party that has led violent protests against what it considers anti-Muslim blasphemy — said Rushdie “deserved to be killed.”
British leader Boris Johnson said he was “horrified”, while in Washington, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan called it a “reprehensible” attack.
– He wrote memoirs in secret –
Although the need for constant security began to wane in the late 1990s, threats and boycotts continued against literary events attended by Rushdie. His knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 2007 sparked protests in Iran and Pakistan, where a government minister said the honor justified suicide bombings.
The fatwa and other threats did not stifle Rushdie’s writing and inspired his memoir “Joseph Anton,” which is named after his alias while in hiding and written in the third person.
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