Famed writer Salman Rushdie hospitalized after stabbing attack

Author Salman Rushdie remains in the hospital after being attacked during a lecture.

Novelist Salman Rushdie in the hospital breathing after being stabbed multiple times during a lecture. His agent says that the Indian American author was breathing through a ventilator and probably will lose sight in one eye.

Rushdie, 75, was being introduced at New York's Chautauqua Institution Riday for a lecture on the importance of freedom of creative expression when he was attacked by a man with a knife.

“The news is not good,” said Rushdie's agent Andrew Wylie later Friday. “Salman will likely lose one eye; the nerves in his arm were severed; and his liver was stabbed and damaged.”

The assailant was detained by audience members during the attack while a doctor in the audience tended to Rushdie's wounds. The suspected assailant was identified as Hadi Matar, 24, from Fairview, New Jersey. No motive or charges have yet been confirmed by police, who are in the process of obtaining search warrants to examine a backpack and electronic devices found at the centre.

Rushdie has faced death threats for more than 30 years since the publication of The Satanic Verses. which offended some Muslims by the way the Prophet Muhammad was portrayed. 

The Satanic Verses was banned first in the author's country of birth, India, and then several other countries before Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa, a decree issued by a religious leader. It called for the death for anyone involved in the publication of the book and offered rewards to those who took part in the slayings. That fatwa has never formally been rescinded. Rushdie has been in hiding since the fatwa was issued.

In 1991 a Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death, while a few months later, an Italian translator was also stabbed and the book's Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot - but both survived.

The Mumbai-born Rushdie, who holds dual citizenships in Great Britain and the United States, was knighted in 2007 by the Queen. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted: "Appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie has been stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend."

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