Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie has been the object of an attack during a presentation in the state of New York, according to the British chain BBCciting witnesses to the assault.
The former Booker Prize winner was speaking at an event of the Chautauqua Institution when an individual approached him and managed to knock him down. The status of the writer is currently unknown.
Rushdie, 75, has spent years living threatened by Iran for his novel the satanic versesconsidered blasphemous by the Iranian authorities and for which the then supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a decree in 1989 calling for the writer’s death.
Salman Rushdie has just been attacked while giving a conference in New York. He had been threatened for years by works such as “The Satanic Verses”, branded as blasphemous. Fanaticism is the worst of cancers. pic.twitter.com/DCGHqFYhXH
— David G. Maciejewski (@dgmaciejewski) August 12, 2022
The Iranian government eventually distanced itself from Khomeini’s ‘fatwa’, but in 2012 a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised Rushdie’s reward from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.
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