A doctor who saved Salman Rushdie’s life after his brutal knife attack in 2022 said he was “lucky”. This is because his alleged assailant was unable to inflict fatal injuries.
“One of the surgeons who saved my life said to me, ‘At first you were really unlucky, but then you were really lucky.’ I said, ‘Lucky is… what?” Reminisced in an upcoming “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper.
“He said, ‘Well, you’re lucky that the man who attacked you didn’t know how to kill someone with a knife,'” the 76-year-old author said on television for the first time since the violence. This was revealed in a clip of his remarks that was aired. It will air in its entirety on Sundays at 7 p.m. on CBS..
Rushdie was scheduled to give a speech at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York on August 12, 2022, when an Islamic fanatic burst onto the stage and stabbed him more than a dozen times in the neck, eyes, and chest. .
The 76-year-old author suffered a shocking attempt on his life and was hospitalized for six weeks, losing vision in his right eye and the use of his left hand.
Rushdie has been a target ever since publishing his acclaimed but controversial novel, The Satanic Verses. The novel is a fictionalized account of the life of the Prophet Muhammad and was considered blasphemous by many Muslims.
In 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa placing a bounty on Rushdie’s head over the book, arresting the respected Muslim-turned-atheist author for 10 years. I hid it.
The stabbing suspect, Hadi Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, had extensive support for Shiite extremists and had shared social media posts supporting Iran and its Revolutionary Guards shortly after the attack. law enforcement officials told the Post.
In an exclusive interview from a detention center days after the attack, Matar told the Post that he had only read “two pages” of “The Satanic Verses” but that he “respected” the ayatollah.
The news that Rushdie managed to survive the bloody assault shocked his attacker, who maintains his innocence and could be sentenced to up to 30 years in prison.
The author plans to publish a memoir about facing death next week, titled “The Knife: Meditations After Attempted Murder.”
Rushdie said the 224-page book, his first since the horrific attack, “was the book I needed to write. It was a way to come to terms with what happened and respond to the violence with art.”
Book publication announcement delayed Mataru’s trial In January, after a New York judge agreed to allow time for the attempted murder attorney to obtain and review Rushdie’s account of the attack.
