Acclaimed author Salman Rushdie is off a ventilator and his health is improving after a stabbing attack for which Iran has denied involvement 33 years after its then-supreme leader called for him to be killed.
“He’s off the ventilator, so the road to recovery has begun,” his agent, Andrew Wylie, wrote in an email to Reuters.
“It will be long; the injuries are severe, but his condition is headed in the right direction.”
Rushdie, 75, was set to deliver a lecture on Friday at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state on the importance of the United States as a haven for targeted artists when a 24-year-old man rushed the stage and stabbed him.
The Indian-born writer has lived with a bounty on his head following the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which is viewed by some Muslims as containing blasphemous passages. In 1989 Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for his assassination.
The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa. But in 2019, Twitter suspended Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s account over a tweet that said the fatwa against Rushdie was “solid and irrevocable”.
Writers and politicians around the world have condemned the attack. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday said Iranian state institutions had incited violence against Rushdie for generations, and state-affiliated media had gloated about the attempt on his life.
Read the article by AAP Newswire in the Shepparton News.