The British writer Salman Rushdie regained the ability to speak and breathed on his own this Saturday, after doctors removed the ventilator that provided him with assisted breathing, after receiving 10 stabbed during an attack on Friday.
The information was disclosed by his agent, Andrew Wylie, who previously stated that the author could lose his right eye.
Rushdie, who for years received death threats for his novel “The Satanic Verses”, was attacked while preparing to give a lecture in upstate New York .
This Saturday, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt announced that Hadi Matar, the man arrested after the attack, was formally charged with second degree attempted murder and second degree assault.
The official added that the alleged attacker was processes He was convicted of those charges on Friday night and is in pretrial detention without bail.
The suspect pleaded not guilty and remains in custody without bail.
Matar is accused of running up on stage and stabbing Rushdie at least 000 sometimes on the face, neck and the abdomen. After the attack, Wylie said that Rushdie had suffered severed nerves in his arm and liver damage.
The writer, from 75 years, has faced death threats for years, as some Muslims view his novel as blasphemous.
Rushdie, who was rushed by helicopter to a local hospital, was involved in an event at the Chautauqua Institution when the attack occurred.
El presenter of the event, Henry Reese, suffered minor injuries.
A video posted on the internet showed attendees going on stage immediately after the incident.
Reactions of condemnation
The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, was one of e the first leaders to condemn the attack
“Dismayed that Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed to death while exercising a right we must never give up to defend. At this time my thoughts are with his loved ones. We all hope that he is well”, he wrote on Twitter.
-
-
- Who is Salman Rushdie and why his work “The Satanic Verses” has generated death threats for more than 16 years
-
The advisor of White House Homeland Security Jake Sullivan said the attack was “appalling”. “We are all praying for his speedy recovery. And we are grateful to the good citizens and first responders for helping him so quickly,” he wrote on Twitter.
The UK Muslim Council also condemned the attack and called for the perpetrator to be brought to justice. justice.
Meanwhile, writers like JK Rowling and Stephen King expressed their support for Rushdie on social networks.
Fatwa against Rushdie
Just two weeks ago, Rushdie assured in an interview for the magazine Stern
that he felt his life was “relatively normal” and that he considered the fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah of Iran, Ruhollah Khomeini, to be a thing of the past.
Rushdie lived in hiding under police protection for several years after Khomeini issued a fatwa -a legal pronouncement in Islam- against him in 1989 for his novel “Los versos sat nicos”.
The work was considered blasphemous by Muslims, and large sums of money were offered to whoever killed the writer.
It started at $1 million dollars, but it was increasing. In 1989 it was $3.3 million and in 2007, various state media from Iran donated $485,000 additional.
This death threat caused the rupture of relations between the United Kingdom and Iran for more than a decade.
-
- The late Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in February 1981.
Never before has a novel created a diplomatic crisis At that level, not one government had publicly ordered the killing of a citizen of another country.
After the religious edict was issued, Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s work, was assassinated stabbed outside his house.
Furthermore, Ettor e Capriolo, who worked on the Italian translation, survived an attack on his apartment in Milan, while the novel’s publisher in Norway was shot on a street in Oslo.
The fatwa in a religious country like Iran is issued by some authority -in this case the Ayatollah- and has the same value as a law. In general, it does not have the purpose of condemning a person to death.
Repeatedly, the religious leaders of Islam in Iran have stated that the decree issued by Khomeini against the writer does not expire.
What is “The Satanic Verses” about?
For the journalist Lawrence Pollard, “The Satanic Verses” must be “the book that has been most talked about and the least read in recent times”.
“Since its publication in 1988, ‘The Satanic Verses’ seems to be more of a principle to fight over than a book to discuss”, he adds.
According to Pollard, the work is made up of three stories, told in three styles, woven into a novel.
In the first story, two Indians fall from a burning plane and survive. One seems to become an angel floating over London and the other sprouts horns and hooves.
In another story, a beautiful poor Indian girl, surrounded by butterflies, leads a pilgrimage of Muslim peasants to the sea, where they drown.
And in the third story, the most controversial, a prophet who seems inspired by the figure of Mohammed founds a religion in the desert.
Although this part only occupies 70 of the 550 pages of a book, is the one that provoked furious reactions.
The text is still banned in India, the country of Rushdie’s birth, and in a wide list of Muslim countries.
The fury of decades for “The satanic verses”
Analysis by Frank Gardner, correspondent for S BBC Security
Have passed 34 years since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s controversial novel “The Satanic Verses”, but his name continues to provoke strong feelings in some quarters.
It has been a long time since the government of Iran distanced itself from Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1989 calling for Rushdie’s execution and offering a $3 million reward for his murder.
But as recently as 1989, the media Iranian state media added $449,10 dollars to the bounty on his head.
The furor that followed the publication of his book, considered blasphemous by many Muslims, had far-reaching consequences. It provoked a deadly riot in Bombay, the burning of his effigy and his books in Britain, as well as attacks on translators and his Norwegian publisher.
But above all, it galvanized a large number of Muslim activists, mostly young men, who wanted to see a more political role for Islam in the world.
Along with the war in Bosnia, which followed a few years later, the Rushdie affair helped ignite the spark for today’s violent jihad.