More than two months after being violently attacked in the United StatesSalman Rushdie has significantly lost the use of one eye and one hand, his agent, Andrew Wylie, told al Spanish newspaper Village. This is the first news since the English writer was hospitalized in mid-August.
“He lost sight in one eye. (…) He had three serious neck injuries. She is disabled in one hand because the nerves in his arm have been severed. And she has about fifteen other injuries to her chest and torso. “said Mr. Wylie Village in an interview published this weekend.
“His wounds were very deep. (…) It was a brutal attack. “ ” [Mais] will live “he added, without specifying whether Mr. Rushdie was still in the hospital. On August 12, Salman Rushdie was about to speak at a conference in upstate New York when a man exploded onto the stage and stabbed him multiple times, including in the neck and abdomen. Evacuated by helicopter to the hospital, the author of the satanic verses she had to wear a ventilator for a short time before her condition improved.
Under a fatwa since 1989
The main suspect, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old American of Lebanese descent, was arrested soon after the incident. During the trial, which opened in mid-August in a Mayville, New York, court, he pleaded not guilty.
The attack was greeted by extremists from Muslim countries such as Iran and Pakistan. The novel The satanic verses it has been banned in Iran since 1988, as many Muslims regard it as blasphemous. The following year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution from 1979 to 1989, issued a fatwa (religious decree) on February 14, 1989, asking all Muslims to kill the British author, thus forcing this. last to live in hiding and under police protection. A fatwa Salman Rushdie said in 2005 was a prelude to the 9/11 attacks.
Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, India in 1947, two months before the country gained independence from the British Empire, was raised by a wealthy, progressive and cultured family of non-practicing Muslim intellectuals. The writer regrets being reduced to the scandal caused by the publication of satanic verses. “My problem is that people keep seeing me through the only prism of the ‘fatwa'”had declared, a few years ago, this free thinker who wants to be considered a writer, and not as the symbol of the struggle against religious obscurantism and for freedom of expression.
