August 13, 2022
Photo credit, PA Medium
Salman Rushdie, in front of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge in 1993.
Indian-born novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed while performing in New York, has received death threats over his work during a five-decade literary career.
Many of the 75-year-old’s books have been hugely successful, with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, winning the Booker Prize in 1981.
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But it was his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, that became his most controversial work – sparking international turmoil unprecedented in scale.
Death threats were made once morest Rushdie, who was forced into hiding following it was published, and the British government placed the author under police protection.
The UK and Iran have severed diplomatic ties, but across the Western world authors and scholars have denounced the threat to free speech posed by the Muslim reaction to the book.
A fatwa – or decree – calling for the novelist’s assassination was issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, in 1989 – the year following the book was published.
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The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, caused an international stir unprecedented in its magnitude.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay two months before India’s independence from Britain.
Aged 14, he was sent to England and rugby school, later earning an honors degree in history at Kings College, Cambridge.
He became a British citizen and gave up his Muslim faith. He worked briefly as an actor – he had been in the Cambridge Footlights – then as a copywriter, while writing novels.
His first published book, Grimus, was not a huge success, but some critics saw him as an author with significant potential.
Rushdie took five years to write his second book, Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, was widely acclaimed and sold half a million copies.
Where Midnight’s Children was regarding India, Rushdie’s third novel, Shame, released in 1983, was regarding a thinly disguised Pakistan. Four years later, Rushdie wrote The Jaguar Smile, an account of a trip to Nicaragua.
In September 1988, the work that would put his life in danger, The Satanic Verses, was published. The surreal and post-modern novel aroused outrage among some Muslims, who considered its content to be blasphemous.
India was the first country to ban it. Pakistan followed suit, as did various other Muslim countries and South Africa.
The novel received acclaim in many quarters and won the Whitbread Prize for Novels. But the backlash over the book intensified, and two months later street protests escalated.
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Demonstrators were seen protesting Satanic Verses in Paris in February 1989.
Muslims considered this an insult to Islam. They objected – among other things – to two prostitutes in the book being given the names of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives.
The title of the book referred to two verses removed by Mohammad from the Quran, as he believed they were inspired by the devil.
In January 1989, Muslims in Bradford ritually burned a copy of the book, and newsagents WHSmith ceased displaying it there. Rushdie denied the blasphemy charges.
In February, people were killed in anti-Rushdie riots across the subcontinent, the British Embassy in Tehran was ransacked and the author’s head was put on the back burner.
Meanwhile, in the UK, some Muslim leaders have called for moderation, others have backed the ayatollah. The United States, France and other Western countries condemned the death threat.
Rushdie – now in hiding with his wife in police custody – expressed deep regret for the distress he had caused Muslims, but the Ayatollah renewed his call for the perpetrator’s death.
The London offices of Viking Penguin, the publishers, were picketed and death threats were received at the New York office.
But the book became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. Protests once morest the extreme Muslim reaction have been supported by EEC countries, all of which have temporarily recalled their ambassadors from Tehran.
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An Indian muslin wearing a Rushdie mask was one of many protesting once morest the author’s presence in Bombay in January 2004.
But the author was not the only one to be threatened on the contents of the book.
The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was found dead at a university northeast of Tokyo in July 1991.
Police said the translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, who worked as an assistant professor of comparative culture, was stabbed multiple times and left in the hallway outside his office at Tsukuba University.
Earlier that same month, the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed in his flat in Milan, although he survived the attack.
The death sentence – fatwa – once morest Rushdie ceased to be formally supported by Iran in 1998.
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Rushdie had to go into hiding and received police protection due to the backlash from The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie’s later books include a children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a book of essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991), and the East, West (1994) novels, The Moor’s Last Sigh ( 1995), The Ground Beneath His Feet (1999) and Fury (2001). He took part in the stage adaptation of Midnight’s Children which premiered in London in 2003.
Over the past two decades he has published Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House and Quixote.
Rushdie has been married four times and has two children. He now lives in the United States and was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature.
In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life following the controversy over The Satanic Verses.
