Salman Rushdie says his life is ‘relatively normal’ 2 weeks before stabbing
- The author, 75, seriously wounded in Friday’s attack, recently talked to a German magazine saying he was worried about threats to US democracy
- Meanwhile, the man suspected of attacking him has been charged with attempted murder and assault, prosecutors said on Saturday
In an interview conducted around two weeks before he was stabbed and seriously wounded by an attacker in New York state, author Salman Rushdie said his life was now “relatively normal”, after having lived in hiding for years because of death threats.
Rushdie talked in the interview with Germany’s Stern magazine about the threats he sees to US democracy. He also called himself an optimist, and noted that the fatwa, a religious edict issued in Iran in 1989 that called on Muslims around the world to kill him for blasphemy, was pronounced long ago.
The interview is due to appear in the magazine on August 18, but Stern released it on Saturday, a day after the attack on Rushdie. The interview was conducted about two weeks ago, the magazine’s editorial office said.
Meanwhile, the man suspected of attacking Rushdie was charged with attempted murder and assault, prosecutors said on Saturday.
“The individual responsible for the attack yesterday, Hadi Matar, has now been formally charged with attempted murder in the second degree and assault in the second degree,” said Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt in a statement.
Rushdie remained hospitalised on Saturday having suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye. He was on a ventilator and unable to speak, his agent Andrew Wylie said on Friday evening. Rushdie was likely to lose the injured eye.
Praise has poured in for him from the West, but he was disparaged in Iran. In Tehran, some Iranians praised the attack on an author they believe tarnished the Islamic faith, while others worried it would further isolate their country.
The leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued the 1989 fatwa after Rushdie’s novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ was condemned as blasphemous. Rushdie went into hiding for nearly a decade but in recent years lived relatively openly.
India-born Rushdie, who became a US citizen in 2016 and lives in New York City, said in the German magazine interview that he was worried about threats to democracy in the United States.
These were driven by racism and hatred of the accomplishments of liberalism, and constituted “a preliminary stage of fascism”, he said.
“(Former US President Donald) Trump’s victory over truth is most important there. His people believe that they are lied to by the others, not by him,” he said.
Author Salman Rushdie stabbed in the neck at New York event, put on ventilator
Trump claims falsely that the November 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden was stolen through widespread voting fraud.
Asked whether he was nostalgic, Rushdie, 75, said, “Not necessarily. I love history, but when it concerns my own life, I prefer to look ahead.”
Hadi Matar, the man charged, is a 24-year-old from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the author’s event at the Chautauqua Institution, about 89km (55 miles) southwest of Buffalo in a rural corner of the state.
Matar was born in the US to Lebanese parents a decade after ‘The Satanic Verses’ was published.
Some long-time visitors to the institution questioned why there was not tighter security, given the decades of threats against Rushdie and a bounty on his head offering more than US$3 million to anyone who killed him.
From the White House, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described the attack as “reprehensible” and said the Biden administration wished the novelist a quick recovery.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
