A man with ties to Shia extremism who stabbed Sir Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times in an apparent attempt to enforce Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against The Satanic Verses author has been found guilty of assault and attempted murder.
Hadi Matar, 27, rushed the Booker Prize-winning author as he prepared to deliver a lecture in upstate New York in 2022, leaving him blind in one eye and his left hand paralysed.
Following less than two hours of deliberations, a jury at Chautauqua County Court also found Matar guilty of assault for wounding a second man on stage. He now faces up to 25 years in prison when sentenced in April.
The attack, which took place more than three decades after Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Sir Salman’s execution, was an apparent attempt to silence a writer whose work has long been the target of violent opposition. The author and British citizen has lived under the shadow of a bounty on his head since the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, a novel that provoked widespread Islamist outrage.
Hardline clerics, community leaders, and protesters across the world branded the book blasphemous, organising burnings, demonstrations, and public effigy hangings of Rushdie. Eventually, the agitation caught the attention of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 issued a fatwa sentencing him to death and offering a $3 million reward for his assassination, extending the threat to anyone involved in the book’s publication and distribution.
In the wake of the on-stage stabbing, Iran’s foreign ministry refused to condemn the attack, instead stating that Rushdie and his supporters were to blame. Matar, the man convicted of his attempted murder, had previously expressed sympathies for Shia extremism on social media, including admiration for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organisation by the US.
Sir Salman was the key witness during seven days of testimony, describing in graphic detail his life-threatening injuries and arduous recovery. The Midnight’s Children author, who had been preparing to speak on protecting writers from harm, told jurors he believed he was dying as Matar launched a 27-second attack, recalling how he lay in a “lake of blood”.
At one point, the 77-year-old removed his dark-tinted glasses to show the court his blinded right eye. “You can see that’s what’s left of it. There’s no vision in the eye at all,” he said. He went on to describe how he was stabbed in the hand while attempting to fend off his attacker, an injury that severed all of the tendons and left his hand partially paralysed. In total, he suffered more than a dozen stab and slash wounds to his head, throat, torso, thigh, and hand.
He spent 17 days in a trauma hospital before being transferred to a New York City rehabilitation centre. A trauma surgeon testified that his injuries would have been fatal without rapid treatment, while prosecutor Jason Schmidt told the court that Rushdie lost so much blood he had gone into haemorrhagic shock before reaching hospital.
Jurors were shown slow-motion video footage of the attack, which captured Matar emerging from the audience, walking up a staircase before breaking into a run towards the author. Approaching Sir Salman from behind, Matar can be seen reaching around him to repeatedly stab at his torso with a knife.
Throughout the trial, Matar laughed and smiled with his legal team during breaks in testimony, including on the day Sir Salman recalled the attack. He did not testify in his own defence but made political statements as he entered the courtroom, saying “Free Palestine” on the first day of proceedings and chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on the second.
In addition to his state convictions, Matar is facing federal terrorism charges in a separate trial. In July 2024, a federal grand jury indicted him on three counts: attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah, engaging in an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries, and providing material support to terrorists.
Prosecutors allege that Matar sought to carry out Khomeini’s fatwa, which was later endorsed by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2006. If convicted on these federal charges, Matar faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Despite the assassination attempts, the killings and maimings of those associated with The Satanic Verses, the years in hiding, the safehouses, the bodyguards, armoured cars, the “impossible dream”, as he put it in his memoir, Joseph Anton, of kicking a football in the park with his young son, Rushdie has rarely taken a backward step.
Even after this barbaric attack, he has returned to public life, continuing to speak out in defence of free expression, a principle he has, as Margaret Atwood once remarked, “embodied” ever since Khomeini’s decree. Embodied is right. The life-changing injuries he suffered represent an attack not just on Salman’s freedom of expression, but on all of ours.
But this week, thankfully, Enlightenment values prevailed over a pre-modern residue, the assassin’s veto. The man who admitted to reading but “a few pages” of the book he professed to hate before attempting to kill its author is now behind bars, lost in a darkness that will lengthen into his life.
