He was about to give a talk in Chautauqua, in western New York, when a man attacked him with a knife. British author Salman Rushdie was stabbed on Friday, Chautauqua County police confirmed to AFP. The latter published a press release in which it specifies that the writer was stabbed in the neck and transported by helicopter to a hospital. The interviewer accompanying him on stage suffered a minor head injury. The alleged attacker has been arrested.
Several hundred people were gathered in this conference center, where Rushdie had already intervened in the past. They were removed from the room. “The most terrible event has just happened at the Chautauqua Institution – Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage. The amphitheater is evacuated, ”wrote a witness on social networks. Video images posted on social networks show spectators in a theater rushing on stage to help someone seen on the ground.
Bounty head
By publishing the controversial book satanic verses, Rushdie became the target of a fatwa from Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. A bounty of $3 million was then offered to anyone who killed the writer.
Yet the author, born in 1947 in Bombay, India, two months before its independence from the British Empire, tries not to be reduced to the scandal caused by the publication of this book, which had set the Muslim world ablaze and led in 1989 to a “fatwa” calling for his assassination.
“My problem is that people continue to see me through the sole prism of the fatwa,” said this free-thinker who wants to be a writer, not a symbol, a few years ago. Forced from then on to live in hiding and under police protection, going from cache to cache, he called himself Joseph Anton, in homage to his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. He had to face an immense loneliness, further increased by the break with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, to whom ““The verses…” are dedicated.
Settled in New York for a few years, 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.