British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie, who was seriously stabbed at a state university in New York last week, is on the mend. “Despite serious life-changing injuries, his rebellious, joyful sense of humor did not suffer,” Rushdi’s son Zafar wrote of his father’s condition on his Twitter microblog Sunday night, August 14.

Salman Rushdie, 75, has since been taken off the ventilator and was able to speak a few words, Zafar said.

The perpetrator’s motives are still unclear.

Attack suspect Hadi Matar stabbed Rushdie on August 12 as he spoke at Chautaqua University in western New York. The perpetrator’s motives remain unknown. Internet portals, citing European and Middle Eastern intelligence sources, reported that Matar was in contact via social media with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Iran. At the same time, there is no evidence of Iran’s possible involvement in the Rushdie attack.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, however, was harshly critical of Iran, pointing out that it was Iranian institutions that had been clamoring for violence against Rushdie for generations, and the Iranian media glorifying the recent attack on the writer.

Iran’s top spiritual leadership sentenced Salman Rushdie to death in 1988 for his novel The Satanic Verses. The then spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, said that in this book, Rushdie ridicules Islam, the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad. Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding. He has lived in New York for the past 20 years.