The attacker, New Jersey resident Hadi Matar, stabbed Rushdie in the face, neck, arm and abdomen—14 stab wounds in total. Doctors initially didn’t believe he would survive.
Rushdie told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in a recent interview: “The worst thing was the knife in my [right] eye…, it went as deep as the optic nerve, which is why there’s no possibility of saving the vision.”
Rushdie has lived in constant danger of death from Muslim fanatics since then-Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against him and his publishers at Viking Penguin in 1989 for his book The Satanic Verses, which came out a year earlier.
Khomeini called the book a “blasphemy against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran.”
Translators and publishers of Rushdie’s work were subject to attacks; several were assassinated.
