Mother reports change: Rushdie attacker radicalized in Lebanon

After the knife attack on Salman Rushdie, a 24-year-old who grew up in California is in custody.

Mother reports change: Rushdie attacker radicalized in Lebanon

After the knife attack on Salman Rushdie, a 24-year-old who grew up in California is in custody. His mother reports on a stay in Lebanon after which her son turned into a religious extremist.

According to his mother, the attacker arrested for the knife attack on Salman Rushdie apparently became radicalized during a visit to Lebanon. The British newspaper Daily Mail quoted Silvana Fardos, who lives in Fairview, New Jersey, as her son Hadi Matar "changed a lot" as a result of his trip to her country of birth.

"I expected him to come back motivated to finish school, get his degree and a job," said the mother, referring to Matar's trip to Lebanon in 2018. Instead, he "locked himself in the basement." Her son isolated himself and hardly spoke to the rest of the family for months. "He sleeps during the day and gets up at night and eats," Fardos described her 24-year-old son.

Matar repeatedly stabbed Rushdie with a knife at a literary event in upstate New York on Friday. The British-Indian writer was seriously injured and required emergency surgery, but is now on the mend. In a first court hearing on the allegation of attempted murder, Matar declared that he was not guilty. He did not comment on his motives.

Fardos, who works as a teaching assistant and translator, said in the interview that she was Muslim by birth, but neither religious nor political. Before the attack, she had never heard of Rushdie and his book The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims condemned.

Fardos told the Daily Mail her son blamed her for encouraging him to get an education instead of emphasizing his religion. He was "angry that I didn't introduce him to Islam at a young age". Otherwise her son was "very calm" and "introverted", "everyone loved him". According to the Daily Mail, Matar was born in the United States and grew up in California. His parents divorced in 2004, after which his father returned to Lebanon.