Indian-born writer, Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born June 19, 1947 in Bombay (now Mumbai), India. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a contentious figure. Salman Rushdie is infamous for his writings insulting the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, Islam and the family of the Prophet. Mr Rushdie, 75, was attacked while speaking at an event in New York state and was in a critical condition. Read on for five interesting facts about him:
1. Rushdie, whose father was a prosperous Muslim businessman in India, was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he received an M.A. degree in history in 1968. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter. His first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012.
2. The novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Some of the adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and portray both him and his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner that, after the novel’s publication in the summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim community leaders in Britain, who denounced the novel as blasphemous. Public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan in January 1989.
3. On February 14 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard, and—although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other countries—he was compelled to restrict his movements.
5. Recently, author was stabbed in the neck as he was about to give a lecture at Chautauqua in New York. Witnesses said Mr Rushdie was about to speak at the event when the suspect rushed onstage and stabbed him before being wrestled to the ground by staff and other people in the audience. The interviewer, Ralph Henry Reese, also suffered a facial injury in the attack but has been released from the hospital, police said. The author was stabbed in the neck and abdomen approximately 10 times, prosecutors said during the arraignment of Hadi Matar in a New York court. A preliminary review of Matar’s social media showed him to be sympathetic to “Shia” and the causes of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC). The man charged over Friday’s attack has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder, and has been remanded in custody without bail.
6. Author Salman Rushdie has been taken off a ventilator and is able to talk, a day after he was stabbed as he prepared to give a lecture in upstate New York. Rushdie remained hospitalised with serious wounds, but fellow author Aatish Taseer said on Saturday evening that he was “off the ventilator and talking (and joking).” Rushdie, 75, suffered a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, and was on a ventilator and unable to speak, his agent Andrew Wylie said on Friday evening. Rushdie was likely to lose the wounded eye.
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