NEW YORK: Celebrated Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie who suffered near-death injuries after a stabbing spree at a New York event last week, is finally out of the ventilator and undergoing the process of recovery which “will be long”, as per his agent, Andrew Wylie.
Wylie notified Reuters in an email about Rushdie’s current health condition where he wrote, “He’s off the ventilator so the road to recovery has begun…It will be long; the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction.”
Rushdie’s son Zafar also gave a statement revealing his father is still in critical condition but has taken off the ventilator for the time being, which “allowed him to talk and demonstrate that his usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact.”
On Friday, when Rushdie stepped on the podium to deliver a lecture at a literary festival in upscale New York, he was stabbed by an unknown assailant, who was later identified as 24-year-old Hadi Matar from New Jersey.
The renowned author has long been blacklisted with a bounty worth millions of dollars placed on his head for “blasphemous” writing in his book Satanic Verses, which ticked off radical Islamists and triggered Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a ‘fatwa’ against him nearly 33 years ago. Khomeini’s successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 2019 said that the decree remained “irrevocable”.
The assailant, Matar, later appeared in a court of law where he pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault and was denied bail. Rushdie has been forced into a life of hiding and police protection owing to the ‘fatwa’ in 1989.
The 75-year-old writer was at Chautauqua Institution in New York, to speak about the importance of a first-world country like America to give asylum and relief to exiled writers. The stabbing incident happened at a time when Rushdie felt his life was “very normal again.”
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