Famed author Salman Rushdie was stabbed about 10 times with a 15cm blade during the attack at a New York City cultural centre. Photo / Getty Images
Famed author Salman Rushdie was stabbed about 10 times with a 15cm blade during the attack at a New York City cultural centre. Photo / Getty Images
Hadi Matar will be sentenced for the 2022 knife attack on Salman Rushdie in New York.
Matar was convicted of attempted murder and assault, facing up to 25 years in prison.
Rushdie suffered severe injuries, including a severed optical nerve and paralysis in one hand.
An American-Lebanese man will be sentenced on Friday (local time) for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack at a New York cultural centre.
Hadi Matar, 27, faces up to 25 years in prison after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges in February thisyear.
During the trial, Rushdie told jurors about Matar “stabbing and slashing” him during an event at the upscale cultural centre.
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood”.
Hadi Matar faces up to 25 years in prison for the 2022 knife attack on Salman Rushdie. Photo / Getty Images
He previously told media he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses but believed the author had “attacked Islam”.
Matar’s legal team had sought to prevent witnesses from characterising Rushdie as a victim of persecution after Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in the novel.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed in the attack, and he told the court “it was decided the eye would be stitched shut to allow it to moisturise. It was quite a painful operation – which I don’t recommend”.
His Adam’s apple was also lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and he became paralysed in one hand after suffering severe nerve damage to his arm.
British-American Rushdie – now 77 – was rescued from Matar by bystanders. Last year, he published a memoir titled Knife in which he recounted the near-death experience.
His publisher announced in March that The Eleventh Hour, a collection of short stories examining themes and places of interest to Rushdie, will be released on November 4 this year.
Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981), which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.
But The Satanic Verses brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention. Rushdie became the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable under any circumstance.
Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times. Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years – until the attack – he lived relatively normally in New York.
