Hadi Matar, the man convicted of stabbing the blasphemous author Salman Rushdie in an attack at a New York lecture in 2022, was sentenced to 25 years in prison today.
The attack occurred on August 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution, where Rushdie was preparing to speak on writer safety.
Matar, then 24, stormed the stage and stabbed the 77-year-old author more than a dozen times in the head, neck, torso and hand.
The assault, witnessed by an audience of approximately 1,400, also wounded Henry Reese, the event’s co-founder, who sustained a gash above his eye while attempting to intervene.
During the trial, Rushdie testified vividly about the attack, recounting how he believed he was dying as he lay in a “lake of blood.”
He described the severe injuries that required 17 days in a Pennsylvania hospital and weeks in a New York rehabilitation centre.
Prosecutor Jason Schmidt argued for the maximum sentence, stating that Matar’s attack was designed to inflict maximum damage not only on Rushdie but also on the literary community.
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“This was a deliberate act meant to terrorise,” Schmidt told the court.
Matar, who called Rushdie a “hypocrite” in a statement about freedom of speech before sentencing, showed no visible reaction as the sentence was delivered.
Matar’s defense attorney, Nathaniel Barone, had pushed for a 12-year sentence, noting Matar’s clean prior record and questioning whether the audience should be considered victims.
However, the judge upheld the maximum penalty. Matar received a concurrent seven-year sentence for wounding Reese, as both injuries occurred in the same event.
The attack has been linked to a decades-old fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death, issued in 1989 by Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini over Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which Muslims deemed blasphemous.
Authorities allege Matar, a U.S. citizen of Lebanese descent, was motivated by the fatwa. Matar faces separate federal terrorism charges, with a trial expected to explore his motives further.
Matar, now 27, will serve his sentence in a New York state prison, with no possibility of parole for at least 25 years.
The Satanic Verses controversy
Upon publication of the Satanic Verses in 1988, Muslims worldwide were outraged by a character called “Mahound,” who appears in dream sequences in the novel and was alleged to be a thinly and perversely disguised representation of the Prophet Muhammad.
The name Mahound was used in medieval Christian plays to represent satanic figures, and some Muslims concluded that Rushdie was implying that Muhammad (pbuh) was a false prophet.
In the book, Rushdie also gave the names of the Prophet’s wives to twelve prostitutes in a brothel. And he invoked a discredited and false tradition – the so-called satanic verses – in which Satan inspired Muhammad (pbuh) to compromise with the people of Mecca and to allow them to continue to worship other deities in an attempt to lure them to Islam.
Pakistan banned the book in November 1988. In February 1989, a 10,000-strong protest against Rushdie and the book took place in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and an American Express office was ransacked.
As the controversy spread, the importing of the book was banned in India and it was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom.
In mid-February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers, and called for Muslims to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves.
In response, the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection. With police protection Rushdie escaped direct physical harm, but others associated with his book weren’t so lucky.
Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, was found by a cleaning lady, stabbed to death in July 1991 on the college campus where he taught near Tokyo. Ten days prior to Igarashi’s killing Rushdie’s Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured by an attacker at his home in Milan by being stabbed multiple times.
William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was critically injured by being shot three times in the back by an assailant on October 11, 1993 in Oslo. Nygaard survived but spent months in hospital recovering.
The book’s Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was the intended target of a mob of arsonists who set fire to the Madimak Hotel after Friday prayers on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 people. Nesin escaped death when the mob failed to recognise him early in the attack.
Finally, in 2006, the Iranian government withdrew its support for the carrying out of the death sentence and Rushdie gradually returned to public life.
