Salman Rushdie teaches us an invaluable lesson | Jill Filipovic

It is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants - even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side

Salman Rushie has spent decades living under threat from religious zealots after a religious leader in Iran called for him to be put to death for the alleged blasphemy of his book The Satanic Verses. On Friday, an assailant attacked Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York, stabbing the 75-year-old author multiple times. Rushdie is now reportedly on a ventilator with serious injuries and may lose an eye, according to his agent Andrew Wylie. A 24-year-old New Jersey man named Hadi Matar is in custody.

Even with a decades-long fatwa hanging over Rushdie, the attack is still shocking. While he spent many years in hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini put a fatwa on his head, and there was a $3m bounty offered for his murder, the author has, in recent years, been much more public. Initially, he tried to be reasonable: he said he regretted hurting people's feelings (I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam," he said in 1989), and he suspended the paperback release of the book to let the dust settle - a move he said later he regretted.