Salman Rushdie attacked on stage in New York

NEW YORK: British author Salman Rushdie, who faced death threats for writing blasphemous content, was attacked on stage Friday in western New York state.

Video footage posted on social media showed people rushing to his aid after he was attacked at the event in Chautauqua County, with police confirming a stabbing while declining to immediately identify the victim.

Chautauqua County Sheriff’s office said “we can confirm there was a stabbing,” without giving further details. Rushdie’s condition was not immediately known. The author, now 75, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel “Midnight’s Children” in 1981, which won international praise and Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.

But his blasphemous book “The Satanic Verses” written in 1988, hurt the sentiments of Muslims across the globe, which led Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to call for his death.

Rushdie, who was born in India, was forced to go underground as a bounty was put on his head. He was granted police protection by the government in Britain, where he was at school and where he made his home. He spent nearly a decade in hiding, moving houses repeatedly and being unable to tell his children where he lived.

Rushdie only began to emerge from his life on the run in the late 1990s after Iran said it would not support his assassination. Now living in New York, he is an advocate of freedom of speech, notably launching a strong defence of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after its staff were gunned down by militants in Paris in 2015.