Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, was on Friday attacked onstage in New York.
The attack happened at about 11 a.m., shortly after the 75-year-old author took the stage for a lecture at the 4,000-seat amphitheater of Chautauqua Institution, a community that offers arts and literary programming during the summer, located seventy miles (110 kilometers) south of Buffalo.
He was there for a discussion about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers and other artists who are under the threat of persecution. The conversation was scheduled to be moderated by Henry Reese, the co-founder of a Pittsburgh nonprofit, City of Asylum, which is a residency program for exiled writers.
Mr. Rushdie had just sat down and was being introduced when the assailant rushed onto the stage and assaulted him.
A witness, Linda Abrams, who spoke to The New York Times said the assailant kept trying to attack Mr. Rushdie even after he was restrained. “It took like five men to pull him away and he was still stabbing,” she said. “He was just furious, furious. Like intensely strong and just fast.”
He was rushed by helicopter to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, the state police said in a statement, adding that there has been no further official confirmation on the extent of his injuries.
Mr. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, attracted fierce criticism by the Muslim community who considered its content to be blasphemous because it fictionalized part of the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
The book was banned in India, where he was born, and he was barred from the country for more than a decade.
The author was forced to go into hiding for nearly a decade after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran issued a fatwa, a religious decree, in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill him.
Rushdie only began to enjoy a more public life in the late 1990s after Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami, in 1998 said Iran no longer supported his assassination. But the fatwa remains in place, reportedly with a bounty attached from an Iranian religious foundation of some $3.3 million as of 2012.
While it was not clear what motivated the attacker, he was immediately taken into custody, police said.
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