In August 2022 Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses (1988), was attacked and seriously injured while onstage at a literary event in Chautauqua, New York. He had been scheduled to give a speech about the United States being a refuge for exiled artists. (Rushdie had spent nearly a decade living in seclusion because of a fatwa, or legal opinion, issued against him by the Iranian government, which considered The Satanic Verses blasphemous against Islam.)
After the attack in 2022, Rushdie faced a long recovery and ultimately lost one eye. In 2024 he released Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, a memoir of the attack and his subsequent recovery. The following year his assailant, Hadi Matar, a U.S. citizen of Lebanese heritage and a supporter of the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah, was found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison; Rushdie testified at the trial. In July 2026 Matar was convicted of providing material support to a terrorist group and committing an act of transnational terrorism; he will be sentenced in November.