Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie had settled into a calmer, relatively normal way of life following a decade of death threats under Iran’s infamous fatwa.
The 77-year-old had even opted for ever-lighter security arrangements in recent years, as the death sentence placed on his head by Iran’s supreme leader in 1989 appeared to be a thing of the past.
But in the space of 27 seconds on August 12, 2022, the celebrated writer fell victim to a savage attack that took one of his eyes and nearly cost him his life. On Friday, his attacker, Hadi Matar, was found guilty of attempted murder and assault after a New York jury deliberated for less than two hours.
Rushdie had been due to give a lecture on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in front of an audience of thousands.
But as he arrived on stage at 10:47 a.m., a man the author referred to as a “murderous ghost from the past” in his memoir Knife rushed towards him and started slashing.
The Booker Prize-winning writer was stabbed around a dozen times in the frenzied attack, which left him with damage to his liver and hands and a severed optic nerve.
“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” Rushdie told jurors during Matar’s trial.
The writer said he first thought his attacker was striking him with a fist, before he saw a large quantity of blood drench his clothes and realised he was being stabbed with a 10-inch knife.
Rushdie – who gained a world wide audience after his second novel "Midnight's Children" was published more than 40 years ago – said the people who subdued the assailant likely saved his life.
Shocked attendees at the literary event rushed on stage to wrestle the masked attacker from Rushdie, before a New York State police trooper who had been providing security at the event arrested him.
“A man jumped up on the stage from I don’t know where and started what looked like beating him on the chest, repeated fist strokes into his chest and neck,” Bradley Fisher, who was in the audience, said at the time. “People were screaming and crying out and gasping.”
The man who had been set to interview Rushdie, Henry Reese, 75, was also injured as he tried to stop the attack after initially believing it was all some kind of prank.
A doctor in the audience helped tend to Rushdie, while they waited for the emergency services to arrive.
The writer was then airlifted to hospital, where he was left on a ventilator and unable to speak.
His wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, took an emergency private flight to be at his side after being told he was unlikely to survive.
Rushdie spent around six weeks in hospital, where he relearned basic skills like squeezing toothpaste from a tube, and has spoken of undergoing painful surgery to seal the lid of his blinded eye.
In an especially cruel twist, the attack impacted the author’s ability to write, including rendering typing a challenge as he still lacks feeling in some fingertips.
But he told the trial he has now largely recovered, although he is not as energetic nor strong as he used to be.
Rushdie took the stand at his attacker’s trial just ahead of the 36th anniversary of the day Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death over the supposed blasphemy in his novel "The Satanic Verses" – 14 February, 1989.
The author – who was born in India, raised in Britain and is now a US citizen – spent years in hiding. While the fatwa was declared “finished” by Iran’s former president Mohammad Khatami in 1998 it has never been officially lifted and the author received death threats for decades.
But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he travelled and lived in New York relatively freely over the past quarter century, and security lightened to the point where his Chautauqua talk was announced months in advance. In 2022, he told the German magazine Stern that the fatwa felt like “long ago”.
Eyewitnesses to the stabbing raised concerns about the apparently minimal level of security, as well as questions over how the perpetrator was able to gain access to the event.
Sources told CNN that recommendations on measures such as bag checks and metal detectors were not taken up by the Chautauqua Institution over fears of changes to its culture. Security at the venue has since been strengthened – although the gated compound remains open to anyone who buys a pass to enter, in what its President Michael Hill called the spirit of what Rushdie stands for, which is “the free exchange of ideas”.
Matar is a dual Lebanese-US citizen, born in the US to immigrants from Yaroun in Hezbollah-dominated southern Lebanon near the Israeli border, according to the village's mayor.
In a jailhouse interview with the New York Post, he did not refer directly to "The Satanic Verses" but called Rushdie someone "who attacked Islam”. On the trial's first day, Mahar calmly said "Free Palestine" while being led into the courtroom.
In a separate indictment, federal authorities allege that Matar was driven to act by a terrorist organization's 2006 endorsement of the fatwa.
Rushdie later said of his attacker: “That guy had his 27 seconds of fame and now he should go back to being nobody.”
