On October 23 (local time), Salman Rushdie’s agent Andrew Wylie said in a statement that the author had lost vision in one eye and movement in one hand following the attack that happened at a literary event in August this year. While speaking to the Spanish newspaper El Pais, Wylie detailed the extent of Rushdie’s injuries after the attack.
He said, “He had three serious wounds in his neck. One hand is incapacitated because the nerves in his arm were cut. And he has about 15 more wounds in his chest and torso.” Wylie refused to comment if Rushdie was still in the hospital or not.
Notably, a 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey stabbed Rushdie just before he was to start his lecture at a literary event at Chautauqua Institution in western New York on 12 August 2022. He pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges. Currently, he is being held without bail in a jail in western New York.
Author Salman Rushdie is best known for ‘The Satanic Verses‘, a book that led to death threats from Islamists around the world, particularly from Iran in the 1980s. The book was banned in India in 1988 by the Rajiv Gandhi government.
He sustained severe injuries and was rushed to the hospital. As per reports, the nerve in his arm got damaged in the attack. He also sustained liver wounds, and the doctors said he might lose an eye, which seems to have happened eventually.
It is noteworthy that 33 years ago, then-Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie, calling on Muslims to kill him. The fatwa was issued in response to the release of the controversial book “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie. The Islamists deemed some of the passages in the book about the Prophet Muhammad to be blasphemous.
Then-President Mohammad Khatami’s government distanced itself from the fatwa in the late 1990s. However, it was never lifted, and the multimillion-dollar bounty issued with the fatwa kept growing over time.
Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2019 said that the fatwa was “irrevocable”, following which he was deplatformed from Twitter.