He had no idea of the tsunami of outrage that was to overshadow the rest of his life, or that he was about to become a geopolitical booby trap.īy October 1988, he already needed a bodyguard in the face of a deluge of death threats, cancelling trips and hunkering down. Does the fatwa still exist on Rushdie?ĭespite a conciliatory statement made by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie’s declaration that he would no longer live in hiding, the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently, since fatwas can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.The Indian-born author had come from a career as an advertising copywriter, confecting slogans such as “naughty but nice” for cream cakes, for example. While Rushdie was given security, there have been several assassination attempts made on his translators, including Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, who was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991.Įttore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing in Milan on 3 July 1991. William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, was shot three times in an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, but survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was possibly the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in 37 deaths. I doubt very much that Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or more than selected extracts out of context.” Salman Rushdie in Cartagena at a previous Hay festival (photo: AFP/Getty Images) The assassinations It’s not true that this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I’m very sad that it should have happened.

Rushdie, talking about the fatwa on BBC Radio 4, said: “Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book.

British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while Norman Tebbit, the party’s former chairman, called Rushdie an “outstanding villain” whose “public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality”.

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie