Author Salman Rushdie — who was stabbed Friday at a literary event in upstate New York — previously complained about having too much security around him.
A lone male attacker attacked 75-year-old writer onstage at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, some 75 miles south of Buffalo. Rushdie was stabbed in the neck and airlifted to an area hospital, the New York State Police said in a statement.
He was at Chautauqua for a “discussion of the United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression,” according to the institution’s website.
In 2001, Rushdie publicly complained about having too much security around him.
While attending the Prague Writer’s Festival, he told reporters, “To be here and to find a large security operation around me has actually felt a little embarrassing … I thought it was really unnecessary and kind of excessive and was certainly not arranged on my request.
“I spent a great deal of time before I came here saying that I really didn’t want that. So I was very surprised to arrive here and discover a really quite substantial operation, because it felt like being in a time warp, that I had gone back in time several years.”
In 1988, the author’s book, “The Satanic Verses,” caused controversy in Muslim communities and led to a fatwa being placed on him.
On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, then the Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa against Rushdie — calling for his death — over his book “The Satanic Verses.” Offended by what he considered to be blasphemous references to the Muslim religion, Khomeini released a judgment, broadcast on Iranian radio, that called for Rushdie “to be killed without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth.”
The British government had Rushdie under protection from 1989 until 2002.
The author moved to New York City in 2000.
In 2017, Rushdie appeared on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and actually poked fun at the death threat. On the show, he offered Larry David advice on how to handle a fatwa that was placed on the comedian after making fun of the Ayatollah. Rushdie went so far as to claim that it attracted women who were drawn to having “fatwa sex.”
In 2021, Rushdie told The Guardian, “It’s true, I am stupidly optimistic and I think it did get me through those bad years because I believed there would be a happy ending when very few people did believe this.”