Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed author who was hospitalized Friday with serious injuries after being stabbed repeatedly during a public appearance in New York state, is off a ventilator and his condition is improving, his agent said Sunday.
“He is off the ventilator, so the road to recovery has begun,” his agent, Andrew Wylie, wrote in an email to Reuters. “It’s going to be a long one; the injuries are serious, but his condition is going in the right direction.”
Rushdie, 75, was scheduled to deliver a lecture on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when police alleged a 24-year-old man rushed the stage and stab
The Indian-born writer has lived with a bounty on his head since his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Iran to urge Muslims to kill him. Amid death threats, he spent nine years in hiding under a British government protection program in the 1990s.
The suspect in the attack, Hadi Matar, of Fairview, NJ, pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault at a court appearance on Saturday, his court-appointed attorney, Nathaniel Barone, told Reuters .
After hours of surgery, Rushdie had been put on a ventilator and was unable to speak until Friday evening, Wylie said in a previous update on the novelist’s condition, adding that he was likely to lose an eye and had nerve damage to his arm and injuries to his liver.
Rushdie is on the mend after being attacked Friday at Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY For more than 30 years, the award-winning author has faced death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses. (Joshua Goodman/The Associated Press)
Wylie did not provide further details about Rushdie’s health in his email on Sunday.
“Although his life-changing injuries are serious, his usual combative and defiant sense of humor remains intact,” Rushdie’s son, Zafar Rushdie, said in a statement Sunday, stressing that the The author was still in critical condition.
The statement on behalf of the family also expressed gratitude to “members of the public who bravely jumped to her defense,” as well as the police, doctors and “the outpouring of love and support from all around Of the world”.
Writers, politicians condemn the aggression
The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an attack on freedom of expression. In a statement on Saturday, US President Joe Biden praised the “universal ideals” of truth, courage and resilience embodied by Rushdie and his work.
“These are the building blocks of any free and open society,” Biden said.
Writer and longtime friend Ian McEwan called Rushdie “an inspiring defender of persecuted writers and journalists” and actor and author Kal Penn called him a role model “for a whole generation of artists, especially many of us from the South Asian diaspora.”
A general view shows the UPMC Hamot Surgery Center in Erie, Penn., Saturday, where author Salman Rushdie is recovering. (Jorge Uzon/AFP/Getty Images)
Neither local nor federal authorities offered any additional details about the investigation Saturday. Police said Friday they had not established a motive for the attack.
An initial law enforcement review of Matar’s social media accounts showed he was sympathetic to Shiite extremism and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), although they had not found definitive links, according to NBC New York.
Iran’s newspapers praise the attack
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim family and has lived in Britain and the United States, is known for his surreal and satirical prose, beginning with his Booker Prize-winning novel the 1981 Midnight’s Children, in which he harshly criticized the main era of India. minister, Indira Gandhi.
Infused with magical realism, The Satanic Verses drew the ire of some Muslims who considered elements of the novel blasphemous.
On Sunday, Iran’s state-run newspaper Iran Daily hailed the attack on the perpetrator as an “implementation of divine decree.” Another hard-line newspaper, Kayhan, called it “divine revenge” that would partially calm the anger of Muslims.