A doctor who helped save Salman Rushdie’s life following the heinous 2022 knife attack on the acclaimed author said he was “lucky” — because his accused assailant failed to land a killing blow.
“One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me ‘First you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky.’ I said, ‘What’s the lucky part?’” Rushdie recalled in an upcoming “60 Minutes” interview with Anderson Cooper.
“He said, ‘Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife,” the author, 76, revealed in a clip of his first televised remarks since the violent incident, which airs in full Sunday at 7 p.m. on CBS.
Rushdie was set to deliver a speech at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York on Aug. 12, 2022, when an Islamic fanatic rushed onstage and stabbed him more than a dozen times, including in the neck, eye and chest.
The 76-year-old author, who was hospitalized for six weeks following the shocking attempt on his life, lost sight in his right eye and use of his left hand.
Rushdie has had a target on his back since publishing his acclaimed yet controversial novel “The Satanic Verses,” which many Muslims deemed blasphemous over its fictionalized accounts of the life of the Prophet Muhammad.
In 1989, the Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa putting a bounty on Rushdie’s head over the book, sending the venerated Muslim-turned-atheist author into hiding for a decade.
Alleged stabber, Hadi Matar of Fairview, NJ, had shared social media posts cheering on Iran and its Revolutionary Guard, in addition to broader support for Shi’a extremism, law enforcement sources revealed to The Post soon after the attack.
In an exclusive jailhouse interview days after the attack, Matar told The Post he had only read “two pages” of “The Satanic Verses,” but “respected” the ayatollah.
News that Rushdie managed to cling to life after his bloody attack shocked his assailant, who pleaded not guilty and faces up to 30 years in prison.
The writer is set to publish a memoir next week about his brush with death titled “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.”
The 224-page text, his first since the harrowing attack, “was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened and to answer violence with art,” Rushdie has said.
News of the book’s publication delayed Matar’s trial in January after a New York judge agreed the alleged attempted murder’s legal team could have some time to obtain and review Rushdie’s accounts of the attack.
