On the morning of August 12, 2022, British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, then 75 years old, was attacked by 24-year-old Hadi Matar on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York moments before he was scheduled to deliver remarks to a packed amphitheater.
Brandishing a grey metal folding knife with a six-inch blade, Matar began stabbing Rushdie in front of a horrified crowd of 1,400 attendees. Countless others watched via a remote livestream. A group of those present pulled Matar off Rushdie approximately half a minute after the assault began. By that point, Matar had stabbed Rushdie 15 times.
Rushdie was airlifted to a nearby hospital in critical condition and placed on a ventilator. He spent 17 days in the hospital recovering from the attack, which ultimately left him blind in one eye, paralyzed in one hand and suffering from serious liver damage. He would go on to detail the assault in his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
Matar pleaded not guilty to his crimes, but Chautauqua County District Court tried and convicted him for attempted murder and assault. He received a sentence of 25 years in prison in May 2025.
Jason Schmidt, the District Attorney for Chautauqua County and the lead prosecutor on the case, tells A&E True Crime he felt happy with the sentence, which represented the maximum amount permissible by state law.
Matar “committed a horrific premeditated act,” Schmidt says. “He wasn’t seeking to hurt just Mr. Rushdie, but [also] an entire group of people in this amphitheater who had gathered to hear a discussion about freedom of expression and all the efforts that are made to protect writers.”
Matar is also awaiting trial on federal terrorism charges.
Why Was Salman Rushdie Attacked?
Rushdie catapulted to literary fame in 1981 with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won the prestigious Booker Prize. But while Midnight’s Children made Rushdie famous, it was his fourth novel, Satanic Verses, published in 1988, that gained him the dangerous notoriety that would ultimately lead to his stabbing more than 30 years later.
In Satanic Verses, Rushdie wrote a plotline about the Muslim prophet Mohammed transcribing Quranic verses as dictated to him by Satan. The book drew outrage from many devout Muslim communities, and in 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini issued a “fatwa”—a formal ruling or interpretation of Islamic law—calling for the assassination of Rushdie and all those involved with the book.
“The ostensible reason was because these so-called satanic verses were non-canonical and had undermined the authority of Islam,” says Chronicle of Higher Education senior editor Len Gutkin, who has written about sensitivity surrounding supposedly blasphemous speech against Islam and other major religions. “But the real reasons are highly political and involve Ayatollah Komeni’s attempt at preserving his own power by scapegoating Western enemies of Iran.”
At the time of the assassination attempt, Iran’s bounty on Rushdie had been set at approximately $3 million.
Were Other People Hurt in the Attack on Salman Rushdie?
Several onlookers at the amphitheater worked swiftly to neutralize Matar, including Henry Reese, the man scheduled to interview Rushdie on stage. Reese was stabbed in the face as a result—a less severe injury that required stitches, but no lengthy hospital stay.
Schmidt expressed awe at the heroism of the Chautauqua Institution’s audience members, many of whom were senior citizens: “How many people put their lives on the line? They just took this guy down so quickly. If not for that, Mr. Rushdie would be dead.”
But the Chautauqua Institution attack marks only the latest in a string of violent acts that followed the publication of Satanic Verses and the fatwa that followed it.
The novel’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was fatally stabbed in Tokyo in July 1991. The novel’s Italian translator survived a stabbing. The Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.
Gutkin says that Western governments and public figures erred on the side of sensitivity towards devout Muslims in the follow-up to the publication, rather than standing up for the principles of free speech.
“They could’ve more fulsomely defended his right to write what he had written,” he believes. “It was a really surprising response to threats on a man’s life.”
Why Did Hadi Matar Plan His Attack on Salman Rushdie?
Matar’s profile comes off counterintuitive to what one might expect from a would-be assassin of a public figure. He did not idolize or obsess over Rushdie, telling the New York Post in a jailhouse interview that he’d only read “a couple pages” of Satanic Verses.
Nor did Matar neatly fit the profile of a radical religious terrorist. Matar was born in California to Lebanese parents who divorced when he was 6 years old, at which point his father returned to Lebanon. Matar, his mother and his two sisters moved to suburban New Jersey, where he lived until the time of the attack.
Matar began planning the assassination half a year in advance, after reading a tweet in the winter of 2022 announcing Rushdie’s speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Institution. The day before the attack, Matar took a bus from New York City to Buffalo, N.Y., then a Lyft to Chautauqua, N.Y., where he slept in the grass before the morning’s attempted murder.
“He’s not a genuine religious fanatic,” Gutkin says. “He’s a disturbed young guy who was looking for some extravagant gesture to give his life meaning. It’s not that this wasn’t an act of religious terrorism, but maybe this was the kind of American act of random violence that we’ve become drearily familiar with.”
Related Features:
Ellen Greenberg’s Mysterious Death: Could Someone Be Capable of Stabbing Themselves 20 Times?
Khalid Latif on the True Meaning of Giving
Why Brenda Lafferty Was Murdered by Her Husband’s Fundamentalist Family
