(DailyAnswer.org) – The trial of Salman Rushdie’s attacker has been postponed to allow for the publication of the author’s memoir in April. Rushdie was stabbed over a dozen times on the 12th of August as he was about to give a lecture in New York, resulting in 15 wounds to his chest and torso and serious neck wounds. Rushdie lost an eye and the use of one hand in the attack.
The moderator defending the author, Henry Reese, suffered a knife wound and a black eye. Nathaniel Barone, the lawyer representing the accused Hadi Matar successfully petitioned to postpone the trial, arguing that they have the right to see the published memoir. The district attorney Jason Schmidt, however, has stressed that the delay will not alter the final outcome of the trial.
The author made his first in-person appearance since the attack in May 2023, appearing to be in good spirits and happy to be in the company of fellow writers at the annual literary gala of PEN America. 26-year-old Matar has been held without bail since the attack on the 75-year-old, and in June 2023 Rushdie was unsure whether he wanted to face his attacker in court, stating that he did not have a high opinion of him but that he also wanted to get on with his life after the incident. The author’s memoir is titled Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, and focuses on the traumatic assault.
No stranger to threats of violence, Salman Rushdie first went into hiding in 1989 after the publication of the Satanic Verses the previous year prompted the ordering of a fatwa against him by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader and founder of the Islamic Republic. Rushdie commented that the reasons for the controversy surrounding his novel related to the taboo of depicting Muhammad in a human form with human weaknesses.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed Iran for inciting violence against the author for decades without directly implicating them in connection to the attack; Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Nasser Kanaani, however, without accepting responsibility for or officially condoning the attack, argued that the only person deserving of condemnation was Rushdie himself for insulting Islam, and a newspaper backed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei went as far as praising the accused for his attack on the “apostate”.
The CEO of Penguin Random House, Nihar Malaviya, has stated that he is proud to be publishing Rushdie’s memoir, expressing his admiration for the author and his determination to return to his writing and tell his story of the attack.
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