Salman Rushdie, the acclaimed author who was hospitalized Friday with serious injuries after being repeatedly stabbed during a public appearance in New York state, has been taken off a ventilator and is improving, his agent said Sunday.
“He has been taken off the ventilator so the road to recovery has begun,” his agent Andrew Wiley wrote in an email to Reuters. “It will be long; the injuries are severe, but his condition is going in the right direction.
Rushdie, 75, was scheduled to give a lecture on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institute in western New York when police say a 24-year-old man rushed the stage and stabbed him.
The Indian-born author has been living with a bounty on his head since his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses prompted Iran to call on Muslims to kill him. Amid death threats, he spent nine years in hiding under a British government protection program in the 1990s.
The suspect in the attack, Hadi Matar of Fairview, New Jersey, pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault at a court appearance on Saturday, his court-appointed attorney, Nathaniel Barone, told Reuters.
After hours of surgery, Rushdie was put on a ventilator and has not been able to speak since Friday night, Wiley said in a previous update on the novelist’s condition, adding that he is likely to lose an eye and has nerve damage in his hand and wounds to his liver .
Rushdie is being cared for after being attacked Friday at the Chautauqua Institute in Chautauqua, N.Y. For more than 30 years, the award-winning author has faced death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses. (Joshua Goodman/Associated Press)
Wiley did not provide further details about Rushdie’s health in his email on Sunday.
“Although his life-changing injuries are severe, his usual boisterous and defiant sense of humor remains intact,” Rushdie’s son Zafar Rushdie said in a statement Sunday, noting that the author remained in critical condition.
The statement on behalf of the family also expressed gratitude for the “audience members who bravely jumped to his defense”, as well as the police, doctors and “the outpouring of love and support from around the world”.
Writers, politicians condemn the encroachment
The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an attack on freedom of expression. In a statement on Saturday, US President Joe Biden hailed the “universal ideals” of truth, courage and endurance embodied by Rushdie and his work.
“These are the building blocks of any free and open society,” Biden said.
Writer and long-time friend Ian McEwan called Rushdie “an inspiring advocate for persecuted writers and journalists”, and actor and writer Cal Penn called him a role model “for a whole generation of artists, especially many of us in the South Asian diaspora”.
A general view shows the UPMC Hamot Surgery Center in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, where author Salman Rushdie is recovering. (Jorge Uzon/AFP/Getty Images)
Neither local nor federal authorities provided additional details about the investigation Saturday. Police said Friday they had not determined a motive for the attack.
An initial law enforcement review of Mattar’s social media accounts showed he sympathized with Shiite extremism and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), though no definitive links were found, according to NBC New York.
Iranian newspapers praised the attack
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim family and lived in Britain and the US, is known for his surreal and satirical prose, beginning with his 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children, in which he sharply criticized the then Prime Minister of India Minister Indira Gandhi.
Inspired by magical realism, The Satanic Verses drew the ire of some Muslims, who considered elements of the novel blasphemous.
On Sunday, Iran’s state-run Iran Daily praised the attack on the author as “the fulfillment of a divine decree”. Another hardline newspaper, Kayhan, called it “divine revenge” that would partially appease Muslim anger.
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