It is yet to be confirmed if Rushdie was stabbed or just punched while the condition of his health is yet to be known.
New York: Author Salman Rushdie, whose writing resulted in death threats from Iran in the 1980s, was attacked on Friday when he was about to deliver a lecture in western New York.
According to Associated Press, one of its reporters saw a man “storm the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and begin punching or stabbing Rushdie as he was being introduced”. While the author fell to the ground, the man was restrained, said AP.
It is yet to be confirmed if Rushdie was stabbed or just punched while the condition of his health is yet to be known.
Salman Rushdie’s book ‘The Satanic Verses’ was banned in Iran since 1988 as many Muslims consider it to be blasphemous. Around a year later, Iran’s late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or an edict, advocating Rushdie’s death.
A whopping $3 million was announced as a bounty for anyone who kills Rushdie. The Iranian government has for a long time distanced itself from Khomeini’s fatwa. A semi-Iranian religious foundation in 2012 raised the bounty to $3.3 million from $2.8 million.
Salman Rushdie or Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on June 19, 1947 during the British era into an Indian Kashmiri Muslim family. His father Anis Ahmed Rushdie was a Cambridge-educated lawyer-turned-businessman and mother Negin Bhatt was a teacher.
His father was dismissed from the Indian Civil Services (ICS) after it was found that the birth certificate submitted by him had deliberate changes to make him appear younger than he was. Salman Rushdie, who has three sisters, wrote in his 2012 memoir that his father adopted the name Rushdie in honour of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
Salman Rushdie grew up in Bombay and went to the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort before he moved to England to attend the Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, and then King’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history. After graduating from Cambridge, Salman Rushdie briefly lived with his family in Pakistan, who had moved there from Bombay, before moving permanently to the UK.
