Salman Rushdie konfrontiert sein Gespenst aus der Vergangenheit... Der Moment der Wahrheit nach den Stichen des Verrats.

Am evening of August 12, 2022, as Salman Rushdie sat on a theater stage at the "Chautauqua" cultural festival in northern New York, an unexpected event occurred; a young man rushed towards him, wielding a knife, and delivered ten sudden stabs to his neck, eye, hand, and chest. One of the stabs was so severe that it resulted in the removal of his eye. This sudden attack came 34 years after a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, calling for Rushdie's blood to be shed due to his novel "The Satanic Verses" which was deemed offensive to Islam.

The attacker, Hadi Matar, an American of Lebanese descent, was born in New Jersey 26 years ago. Matar had not read the book in its entirety, but later admitted that he had only "read a few pages". However, he learned from the internet that Rushdie would be attending the festival, so he decided to seek revenge for him because of the fatwa. When journalists from the "New York Post" asked him a question in prison a week after his arrest, Matar replied: "I read a few pages. I did not read the book in full," adding that he decided to go to the theater and punish Rushdie with ten stabs.

This attack was not just a passing event. Hadi had spent a month in Lebanon in 2018, and returned to America after this trip to be a different person, according to his mother, Sylvana Firdaus. She said, "He locked himself in the basement when he returned from Lebanon, cooked his own food, and no longer spoke to me much, but started scolding me for not raising him strictly as a Muslim." This change in Matar's behavior was a sign of his internal transformations after returning from Lebanon.

Rushdie, who was 77 years old at the time of the attack, did not expect the "ghost of the past" to haunt him after more than three decades of the fatwa. In his book "Knife" released last year, Rushdie described those moments, saying: "The first thing that came to my mind when I saw him rushing towards me was to say: So you are you. The second thought was: Why now? After all these years? Surely the world has moved on, and the matter has been closed."

However, as described in the book, Matar was like a "killer ghost from the past" who quickly approached. Despite many years passing since the Iranian fatwa, Rushdie still faced the consequences.

The police who arrived at the scene quickly arrested Matar and raided his home in Fairview, New Jersey, where he lived with his mother and twin sisters. In the court proceedings starting on Tuesday, the prosecutor, Jason Schmidt, will stand before the judge to present the case of the attack. The prosecutor plans to summon Salman Rushdie as a witness in the session.

Matar, who faces charges of "supporting a foreign terrorist organization" in reference to Hezbollah, in addition to "attempted murder" and "assault", could face penalties of up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

This courtroom encounter is the next chapter in Salman Rushdie's story that is not yet over, between his past and the consequences of the fatwa; this tale remains open until the judgment is made in the case of the attack he endured, for everyone to discover how killers face the past in our time.