” Lhe news is not good, ”said Friday evening at the New York Times the British writer’s agent, Andrew Wylie. Salman Rushdie, author of satanic verses and target for more than 30 years of a fatwa from Iran, was placed on a ventilator after being stabbed in the neck and abdomen in New York state on Friday by a man who was arrested.
“Salman will probably lose an eye; the nerves in his arm were severed and he was stabbed in the liver”, detailed Andrew Wylie, specifying that Salman Rushdie, 75, had been placed on an artificial respirator.
Stabbed at a literary conference
Immediately after his attack, on the stage of an amphitheater at a cultural center in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, Salman Rushdie was transported by helicopter to the nearest hospital where he was operated on urgently, New York State Police Major Eugene Staniszewski told reporters. Shortly before 3 p.m. (French time), “a suspect rushed to the scene [de l’amphithéâtre] and attacked Salman Rushdie and the interviewer” by “stabbing” the writer “in the neck”, the police had very quickly announced, which specified Friday evening that Salman Rushdie had also been stabbed “in the abdomen”. The presenter of the conference, Ralph Henry Reese, 73, was “slightly injured in the face”.
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The attacker was immediately arrested and taken into custody, with Constable Staniszewski revealing his name was Hadi Matar, 24, from New Jersey. Salman Rushdie was preparing to give a literary conference in this small town located 100 km from Buffalo, near Lake Erie which separates the United States from Canada. Carl LeVan, professor of political science, was in the room, and told AFP on the telephone that a man had thrown himself on the stage where Salman Rushdie was seated to stab him violently several times.
“Killing Salman Rushdie”
He “was trying to kill Salman Rushdie,” said this witness. Salman Rushdie, born on June 19, 1947 in Bombay, two months before India’s independence, brought up by a family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals, rich, progressive and cultured, set part of the Muslim world ablaze with the publication of satanic versesleading Iranian Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini to issue a “fatwa” in 1989 calling for his assassination.
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The author had therefore been forced to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache. He then faces an immense loneliness, increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom The verses are dedicated. Living discreetly in New York, 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.
But the fatwa was never lifted and many of the translators of his book were injured by attacks, even killed, like the Japanese Hitoshi Igarashi, victim of several stab wounds in 1991. “Thirty years have passed”, said- he however in the fall of 2018. “Now everything is fine. I was 41 at the time [de la fatwa], I’m 71 now. We live in a world where issues of concern change very quickly. There are now many other reasons to be afraid, other people to kill…” Knighted in 2007 by the Queen of England, to the great displeasure of Muslim extremists, this master of magic realism, a man of immense culture which claims to be apolitical, has written some fifteen novels, children’s stories, short stories and essays in English.
Macron and Johnson condemn
The attack sent shockwaves around the world, with the White House condemning “an appalling act of violence”. “His fight is ours, universal”, launched French President Emmanuel Macron on Twitter, ensuring that he was “today, more than ever, by his side”. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed while exercising a right that we should never stop defending”, referring to freedom of expression.
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UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said through his spokesman that he was “horrified” by the attack, adding “in no way was the violence a response to words”. The association for the defense of writers in the world PEN America was also “shocked” by revealing that Friday morning Mr. Rushdie had offered his “help for Ukrainian writers”.
“Nothing justifies a fatwa, a death sentence”, was indignant Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper decimated by an Islamist attack in 2015. “The freedom to think, reflect and express oneself has no value for God and his servants. And in Islam, whose history has often been written in violence and submission, these values simply have no place, because they are so many threats against its hold on people’s minds,” argues Riss. .
According to the editor of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, “The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was even more shocking than what he wrote in his book, The Satanic Verses, was absolutely not disrespectful of Islam”. According to him, this is a “reasoning of a very great perversity because it induces that, conversely, disrespectful remarks towards Islam would justify a fatwa and a punishment, even if it is mortal”.