Rushdie attacker convicted of federal terrorism charges in 2022 stabbing

A jury in Buffalo, New York, found Hadi Matar guilty on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges for stabbing author Salman Rushdie in August 2022. The conviction came on all counts, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism, and carries a potential life sentence. Matar, 28, is already serving time on an attempted murder conviction from the same attack.

Rushdie was introducing himself to an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, a cultural and intellectual center in western New York, when Matar climbed onto the stage behind him and drove a knife into his body fifteen times. Spectators and another speaker, Henry Reese, rushed to help. Law enforcement officers present at the event arrested Matar after civilians subdued him. The author survived, but the wounds left him gravely injured: he lost sight in his right eye, his left hand was badly damaged, and his liver was severely harmed. He considers his survival "a miracle."

The attack was rooted in a fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for Rushdie's death over his 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses." The book, a work of magical realism about two actors who survive a plane explosion, won critical acclaim in Britain but provoked outrage in parts of the Muslim world, where some readers saw blasphemous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a dream sequence. Over the following years, at least forty-five people died in riots sparked by the novel; a Japanese translator was stabbed to death, an Italian translator was attacked and survived, and the Norwegian publisher survived a shooting. Rushdie, born into a Muslim family, has maintained that the dream sequence was fictional invention, nothing more.

Prosecutors argued that Matar was motivated by Khomeini's fatwa and by the ideology of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States. Born in America but holding Lebanese citizenship, Matar had repeatedly discussed the fatwa in messaging apps during 2021 and 2022, expressing fury that Rushdie had survived and, in his view, emboldened others to insult Islam. Court exhibits showed that Matar had tracked Rushdie's public appearances, identified where he lived, and eventually located his scheduled talk at Chautauqua. In a private note to himself, he wrote: "We need to kill him ASAP." Matar's defense lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, argued that the government had no proof of what motivated his client's actions. Matar himself did not testify. Rushdie did, telling jurors that while he could not speak to Matar's intentions, the wounds were "dispersed across my body."

The fatwa was never formally rescinded. In 1998, Iran's government distanced itself from Khomeini's edict, and Rushdie gradually emerged from hiding after spending a decade under twenty-four-hour police protection in London. But in 2017, Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicated the fatwa remained in effect. An Iranian foundation continues to offer a bounty of more than three million dollars for Rushdie's death. Iran's government has denied any involvement in the 2022 attack.

Rushdie has continued to write and speak despite his injuries. In an interview with "CBS Sunday Morning" in 2025, he described adapting to his lost vision: he now reads on iPads, adjusting the type size and using the screen's light to compensate for his damaged eye. He published a memoir about the attack in 2024 and returned to fiction with "The Eleventh Hour" the following year. He was knighted by Britain's late Queen Elizabeth II and received a Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award in November. When asked by "60 Minutes" in 2024 whether the attack had changed who he was, Rushdie said it had not—but it left a shadow. "Some days it's dark and some days it's not," he said.