Salman Rushdie’s attacker sentenced to 25 years in prison

A New Jersey man who stabbed and seriously injured acclaimed author Salman Rushdie was sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder.

Hadi Matar, 27, was found guilty on Friday of attempted murder and assault in a court in Chautauqua County, western New York. He was also sentenced to seven years for assaulting Henry Reese, who was going to interview Rushdie at the time of the incident.

Judge David W Foley told Matar that in order to prevent other attacks, a 25-year sentence was necesssary, calling him a “bully” and a “hypocrite”.

Matar, who is originally from California, had pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted murder and assault. 

In August 2022, Rushdie, 77, was about to deliver a lecture on artistic freedom at Chautauqua Institution in western New York state, when Matar ran on stage and stabbed the author more than a dozen times in the head and body. Matar was living in New Jersey at the time of the assault.

Rushdie was hospitalised after the attack and underwent surgery. He was left blind in one eye.

Rushdie’s work, particularly his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, attracted fierce protests and death threats, while the former religious leader of Iran issued a fatwa, a non-binding legal ruling in Islamic law, calling for his assassination.

Tehran has long since distanced itself from former leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s decree, but anti-Rushdie sentiment lingers.

In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8m to $3.3m.

Rushdie dismissed that threat at the time, saying there was “no evidence” of people being interested in the reward.

Rushdie, who was born to non-practising Kashmiri Muslims in India and is himself an atheist, has defended his work on several occasions.

Pen International, a writers’ association that Rushdie is the former president of, condemned the attack and wished the author a “fast recovery” in a social media post at the time.

The Satanic Verses was viewed by many Muslims as containing blasphemous passages.

Rushdie has been nominated for the Booker Prize seven times and won the prize in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children. The book is an allegory of India’s transition from British colonial rule to partition and independence.

The stabbing was condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on freedom of expression.