Salman Rushdi faces his past ghost.. The moment of truth after the stabs of betrayal.

On the evening of August 12, 2022, as Salman Rushdie sat on a stage at the "Chautauqua" cultural festival in upstate New York, the unexpected happened; 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 his eye being gouged out. 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," deemed offensive to Islam. The attacker, Hadi Matar, an American of Lebanese descent, born in New Jersey 26 years ago, had not read the book in its entirety but later admitted to having only read a few pages. However, he learned from the internet that Rushdie would be attending the festival, so he decided to seek revenge on him due to the fatwa. When journalists from the "New York Post" asked him a question in jail a week after his arrest, Matar replied, "I read a few pages. I didn't read the whole book," adding that he decided to go to the stage 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 a changed person, according to his mother, Sylvana Firdaus. She said, "He isolated himself in the basement when he returned from Lebanon, cooked his own food, stopped talking to me much, and 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 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, it's 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 swiftly approached. Despite many years passing since the Iranian fatwa, Rushdie still faced the consequences. Police arrived quickly at the scene and arrested Matar, raiding his home in Fairview, New Jersey, where he lived with his mother and twin sisters. In the court proceedings set to begin on Tuesday, the prosecutor, Jason Schmidt, will present the case of the attack. The prosecutor plans to call Salman Rushdie as a witness in the session. Matar, facing charges of "supporting a foreign terrorist organization" in reference to Hezbollah, as well as "attempted murder" and "assault," could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. This courtroom meeting is the next chapter in Salman Rushdie's story that is far from over. Between his past and the consequences of the fatwa, this tale remains open until the judgment is made in the attack case, revealing how killers face the past in our time.