Rushdie in hiding after Ayatollah's death threat | Books | The Guardian Rushdie in hiding after Ayatollah's death threat Wednesday 15 February 1989 06.43 EST First published on Wednesday 15 February 1989 06.43 EST Close This article is 27 years old Mr Salman Rushdie was in hiding under police protection last night and unrepentant about the contents of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which yesterday provoked the Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to call for his execution. The Foreign Office hopes for clarification from the Iranian government, amid fears that Islamic anger at the book could overshadow improving relations between London and Tehran and efforts to free hostages believed held by pro-Iranian factions in the Lebanon.

A Foreign Office spokesman said reports of the Ayatollah's comments were 'a matter for serious concern.' The Iranian threat to Mr Rushdie was broadcast by Tehran radio, which quoted the Ayatollah saying: 'I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.' Assailants who died in the process would be instant martyrs to Islam. The Iranian prime minister, Mr Mir-Hossein Mousavi, pronounced today a day of mourning against the book. The threat to Mr Rushdie's life is the latest twist in a saga of increasingly violent opposition to his book by Muslims who insist it is blasphemous about the prophet Mohammed. It has been banned in India, where Mr Rushdie was born a Muslim in 1947, and in South Africa. Last month, copies were burned in Bradford, Yorkshire, and last weekend five protesters were shot dead by police during demonstrations in Islamabad, Pakistan. Mr Rushdie asked for police protection immediately after the Ayatollah's threat.

Last night Scotland Yard would only say the threat was being taken seriously. The office of the book's publishers, Viking, had police on duty and cars were being checked. When Mr Rushdie's wife, Ms Mari Anne Wiggins, left their north London home yesterday afternoon, she said he was 'was absolutely terrified' by the threat. 'The Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a threat to kill my husband. The best thing for him to do now is to stay in hiding with a Special Branch man at his side.' However, Mr Rushdie was not cowed. 'Frankly I wish I had written a more critical book,' he said during a television interview. 'A religion that claims it is able to behave like this, religious leaders who are able to behave like this, and then say this is a religion which must be above any kind of whisper of criticism, that doesn't add up.' Nonetheless, he was taking the threat seriously. He said on BBC Radio 4: 'I'm very sad that it should have happened. It's not true that this book is a blasphemy against Islam.

I doubt very much that Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or more than selected extracts out of context.' Strength of feeling against Mr Rushdie was expressed yesterday by some leaders of Britain's Muslim community in comments which several Conservative MPs claimed amounted to incitement to murder. Mr Iqbal Sacranie, of the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, said: 'Death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him .. his mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness to Almighty Allah.' Mr Sayed Abdul Quddus, joint secretary of the Council for Mosques in Bradford, said: 'I totally agree with what Ayatollah Khomeini has said in public. Every Muslim blames Salman Rushdie. If any Muslim will get a chance, he won't avoid it and he should not. Why not? He (Rushdie) has tortured every Muslim.

Why should people be brutally murdered and loose their lives and Salman Rushdie not pay.' Asked precisely where the book offenced the Prophet, Mr Quddus, said: 'In every sentence, the whole contents of the book, is blasphemous and is full of shit.' However, there was a more moderate response from one Muslim leader, Mr Mohammed Ibrahimsa, who said he disagreed with the Ayatollah's orders. However, there was dismay throughout the book world. Mr Tim Godfray of the Booksellers Association said he was totally against intimidation of authors. A spokeswoman for Viking who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal, said in a statement: 'Neither we nor the author of this novel published the book with intent to offend. We are appalled at the tragic loss of life that has already occurred and deplore calls for further violence.' BBC ON THIS DAY | 14 | 1989: Ayatollah sentences author to death About This Site | Text Only 1989: Ayatollah sentences author to death Iranian Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini has issued a death threat against British author Salman Rushdie and his publishers over the book Satanic Verses.

Scotland Yard is providing the author with specialist protection and advice and all 11,000 staff at publishers Viking have received internal memos about the potential danger. Security has been increased at offices, bookshops and distribution depots. Mr Rushdie's editorial director has said a promotional tour of America may have to be cancelled. It is not true this book is a blasphemy against Islam Salman Rushdie The Ayatollah - as Imam, or chief spiritual guide, of Shia Muslims across the world - broadcast a fatwa (edict) on Tehran Radio to eliminate the writer and declared the rest of the day should be one of mourning. His message said: "I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who are aware of its content are sentenced to death." Mr Rushdie, 42, responded hours later. "I am very sad it should have happened," he said. "It is not true this book is a blasphemy against Islam.

"I doubt very much Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read this book or anything more than selected extracts taken out of context." He explained the Satanic Verses attempts to investigate conflicts between religious and secular viewpoints. Published last September, the Satanic Verses has sold 100,000 hardback copies in the UK and US and was runner up for the Booker and Whitbread literary awards. Already banned in five countries, the first demonstrations against the book took place in Bradford, West Yorkshire, where a copy was publicly burned. Politicians in Westminster have expressed outrage at the threat and have called on the government to complain formally to Iran. The Iranian Prime Minister Hussain Mousavi has sanctioned Hezbollah groups to "take the necessary action" against the author. Khomeini Urges Muslims to Kill Author of Novel Khomeini Urges Muslims to Kill Author of Novel By SHEILA RULE ONDON, Feb. 14 -- Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran declared today that the author and publishers of a novel deemed offensive to Islam had been ''sentenced to death.'' The novelist, Salman Rushdie, author of ''The Satanic Verses,'' said he was taking the threat seriously.

The Teheran radio quoted Ayatollah Khomeini as asking ''all the Muslims to execute them,'' referring to Mr. Rushdie, who lives in London, and the publishers of the book, Viking Penguin, ''wherever they find them.'' He said that anyone killed carrying out his order would be considered a martyr. Mr. Rushdie's American agent said there were no plans to call off the author's American promotional tour. All was quiet at Viking Penguin's offices in New York, but a guard there said security was tight. Threat Taken 'Very Seriously' Wednesday was declared a day of mourning in Iran to protest the novel. It has prompted violent protests by Islamic fundamentalists over the author's projection of Islamic myths and Koranic motifs in contemporary and futuristic settings, which many contend is blasphemous. ''The author of the 'Satanic Verses' book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death,'' said Ayatollah Khomeini, whose word is considered law by millions of Shiite Muslims. ''If someone knows them but is unable to kill them, he should hand them over to the people for punishment.'' Mr.

Rushdie, who is 41 years old and was born into a Kashmiri Muslim family in Bombay, could not be reached by The New York Times for comment today. But he was quoted as telling the British Broadcasting Corporation that he had to take the threat ''very seriously indeed'' and that he ''may well have to think about'' applying to the authorities for protection. ''I am very sad it should have happened,'' Mr. Rushdie was quoted by the Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency, as saying. ''It is not true this book is a blasphemy against Islam. I doubt very much Khomeini or anyone else in Iran has read the book or anything more than selected extracts taken out of context.'' Britain's Foreign Office said today that clarification was being sought over Ayatollah Khomeini's remarks, which, ''if true, are a cause for concern.'' [ A leader of the British Muslims, quoted by Reuters, added grave concern to the security situation late tonight by reinforcing Ayatollah Khomeini's call for Mr. Rushdie's execution. Said Abdul Quddas, joint secretary of the Council of Mosques in the northern English city of Bradford, told reporters, ''Every good Muslim is after his life.

He has tortured Islam and has to pay the penalty. He deserves hanging. [ ''There are any number of people who would willingly carry out what to us would not be a crime but a justified act.'' ] A spokesman for Scotland Yard declined to comment on the threat. However, British newspapers said the Special Branch of Scotland Yard was protecting Mr. Rushdie, adding that a team of armed officers was probably assigned to accompany the author. Special Branch officers will also increase surveillance on Muslim fundamentalist groups in London and throughout Britain, the agency said. The Khomeini statement came amid a wave of protests and attempts to ban the book. On Sunday, a mob of thousands of enraged Muslims tried to enter and destroy the American cultural center in Islamabad, Pakistan, because Mr. Rushdie's book is being published in the United States. The attack left five people dead and more than 100 people wounded; three people died in similar disturbances in India on Monday. Muslims in Britain burned copies of the book last month and W. H. Smith booksellers withdrew it from public display in Bradford, a city in the north that has a large Moslem community. The Press Association quoted Mr.

Rushdie's literary agent in Britain, Gillon Aitken, as saying that the author had been ''out and about,'' in response to a question about whether he was in hiding today. ''I assume he has been getting on with his life,'' Mr. Aitken said. ''The Satanic Verses'' begins with a plane crash over the English Channel in which two men survive to be ''born again,'' one with a halo, the other with slowly developing horns and hoofs. It is not clear, despite their appearance, which of them is good and which is evil. They become involved with characters named Alleluia Cone and Mahound, the latter a businessman turned prophet who lives in the imaginary city of Jahilla. 'A Dirty Conspiracy' Mr. Rushdie's character the Prophet Mahound resembles the portrayal of Jesus Christ in Martin Scorsese's film ''The Last Temptation of Christ,'' in that Mahound is depicted as having a human nature and wrestling with temptation. The work is clearly perceived as offensive to Islam, but what exactly is regarded as insulting has not been spelled out.

The Iranian Government condemned the book as ''a dirty conspiracy'' against Islam and urged followers of Ayatollah Khomeini around the world to take action against it. A Government statement read on the Teheran radio called for cells of the Party of God -devotees of the Ayatollah and a group of them in Lebanon is believed to be holding Westerners who are missing and believed kidnapped there - to take ''necessary steps to neutralize this plot.'' ''We call on all Party of God cells in the world of Islam to grasp the depth of this black conspiracy,'' the statement said. ''We advise all Islamic Governments not to place themselves against the million masses of angry Muslims but to demonstrate their disgust and anger, together with their nation, towards this provocative American deed.'' The Iranian press agency quoted Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi as calling Mr. Rushdie an ''American mercenary.'' Mr. Rushdie was quoted as telling Independent Television News here that he doubted that those conducting a campaign against the book were trying to act as ''thought police.'' Salman Rushdie (Author of Midnight's Children) Fiction , Children's Influences edit data Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist.

Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to protests from Muslims in several countries, some of which were violent. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to litera Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to protests from Muslims in several countries, some of which were violent.

Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature", which "thrilled and humbled" him. In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University. Threats to Author Lead to Canceling of Book Tour - NYTimes.com Threats to Author Lead to Canceling of Book Tour By EDWIN McDOWELL Published: February 16, 1989 Salman Rushdie and his publisher yesterday canceled Mr. Rushdie's book tour of the United States, scheduled for 11 cities beginning next week, because of the threats on the author's life. The tour was to promote the novel ''Satanic Verses,'' which many Muslims have denounced as offensive to Islam. The Teheran radio on Tuesday quoted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, as asking all Muslims to execute Mr.

Rushdie and the publishers of the book, Viking Penguin, ''wherever they find them.'' A joint statement yesterday from Mr. Rushdie, in London, and Viking Penguin, in New York, said that the threats ''have led us to conclude that the current climate is not appropriate for a promotional tour in the United States as previously planned.'' A Viking employee, who asked not to be named, said the publisher ''has no intention of withdrawing the book from publication.'' Nor has any further thought been given at this time to having Mr. Rushdie tape interviews for broadcast. Although the book's formal American publication date is Feb. 22, it has been available in stores for several weeks. After an intitial printing of 50,000, there are now 72,500 copies in print, and several bookstores in New York City reported brisk sales yesterday. The statement, issued yesterday afternoon by the publisher, was delayed almost an hour when Viking employes had to vacate their headquarters at 40 West 23d Street in Manhattan about 2:30 P.M. after a telephone bomb threat.

No explosives were found, but a Viking employee said, ''Everybody here is very nervous.'' There were three similar threats against the publisher last month and three in December. The book was banned in India in October and has since been banned in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt and South Africa. In addition, the publishing house -whose sister companies published the novel in Britain in September and Canada in October - has received thousands of letters and cards protesting publication of the book. Many letters contain identical language, as do many of the postcards. ''Some of the mail is angry and some threatening,'' a Viking employee said. Yesterday's joint statement repeated that no offense was intended in the creation or publication of the novel. ''It is also our unalterable position that freedom of speech, freedom to publish, and freedom to read, must be guaranteed internationally,'' it said. A similar position was adopted yesterday by several writers' organizations. The Authors Guild, which on Tuesday had informed Mr. Rushdie of its support, through his American literary agent, Andrew Wylie, said in a statement that it supports the right of all authors everywhere to write without fear of constraint from any quarters.

''We are appalled,'' it said, ''by Ayatollah Khomeini's threats against Salman Rushdie and his publishers.'' Some 50 members of the National Writers Union who are also Viking Penguin authors, also deplored the threats. These include David J. Garrow, Abbie Hoffman, Larry L. King, Maxine Kumin and Ariel Dorfman. Mr. Garrow, who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in biography for ''Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,'' said, ''For anyone to call for the banning of any book, never mind the elimination of an author, is a violation of the intellectual and democratic principles all authors should subscribe to.'' FRENCH PUBLISHER DROPS BOOK PARIS, Feb. 15 (Reuters) - A Paris publishing house has dropped plans to publish a French version of ''The Satanic Verses,'' French radio and television reports said today. The reports said the decision by the publishing house, Presses de la Cite, had been made to protect the publisher's staff, clients and the public from possible revenge attacks by Muslims. No one from the company was immediately available for comment.

Television reports showed the police guarding the company's offices on the Left Bank. Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion | The Independent Profiles Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion In the 17 years since Ayatollah Khomeini passed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, the writer's unflinching criticism of the religion into which he was born has never been stifled. Now, as the force of Islamist fury reverberates around the world, the acclaimed Anglo-Asian novelist tells Johann Hari why we're all living under a fatwa now Thursday 12 October 2006 23:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online And so it begins again: the low rumble of Islamist death-threats against a novelist, simply because he dares to revel in free speech and free thought in a free society. "We're all living under a fatwa now," Salman Rushdie sighs, listing his persecutors' long slew of victims, from Algerian novelists to Bali clubbers to Circle Line commuters. "You can see the fatwa as the overture to 9/11. It's not a direct line.

Maybe you could say it was not the same piece of music. But in some way it was a harbinger - a small thing before a big thing. The first crow, you know, flying across the sky." As we sit in the basement of a lush London hotel he reflects, with calm dignity, on the massed millions of the fanatical who wish to behead him, simply because they think something one of his characters says in a dream in a novel insults a man who died 1,300 years ago. "It was beyond... I can't tell you," he says, a rare moment when his sentences stutter. "I've tried, quite hard, as an act of will, to put it behind me, because I don't want to carry that weight around. And, fortunately, [my wife] Padma didn't experience it. I met her at the tail-end of it, before the Iranians rescinded [the fatwa, in 1998]. That helps." But Rushdie has been forced to get used to life in a damp mental alleyway where the loudest death-threat in history is forever echoing.

One morning, a few days after the fatwa, he woke up and switched on the television to see a British studio audience voting on whether he should be killed. He switched the channel to see tens of thousands of people in Pakistan, a country he had lived in and loved, burning his effigy. He was, he says, "put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness". One time, he had to go to hospital to have his wisdom teeth extracted. Afterwards he learnt that the police had contingency plans to remove him if there was an emergency: he would have been carried out in a body bag, in a hearse. When I arrived at this hotel and waited in the lobby, a strange unspoken conspiracy emerged between me and the receptionist. "There should be a room booked for... uh... Random House books," I said. "Oh yes - the... um... author interview?" Like in some cod James Bond plot, we did not utter his name, as though, almost 18 years after the Ayatollah Khomeini first uttered his call for murder, there are assassins waiting on every London corner for a whisper of his name.

And then Rushdie wandered in, bearing a pile of books, looking like a bustling media don rather than a jihadi-dream-target, with no burly security guards, nobody except a slender press agent hobbling along on crutches. I glance at the receptionist; our silence seems stupid. As we wait for the room, Rushdie chattily talks me through the photo-books he is carrying. "I've just had my picture taken by this guy," he says. I want to hold on to this sliver of normality, to talk about photographers and Borges and Marquez. But the fatwa seems to block out the sky, still. We walk downstairs and out it tumbles - the story of the plot to kill him. When he first heard the Ayatollah Khomeini's call for him to be killed - on 14 February 1989, "my unfunny Valentine" - Rushdie's first thought was: "I'm a dead man." One of his recent characters has a pre-assassination vision "of his open grave, of a rectilinear black hole huddling in the ground, as empty as his life, and felt the darkness measuring him for his shroud".

This battle was agony for Rushdie, not just because he was wrenched away from his wife, his young child, and the countries and cultures that had always nourished him, but because, as he puts it, "the warring halves of the world - East and West - were also the warring halves of my soul" . He is "the bastard child of history", one of the great hybrid-children produced by the mass migrations of the 20th century. He was raised in the East, schooled in the West, and indelibly crafted by both. Salman Rushdie lives and writes on the great global fault-line - and a fault-line is always a dangerous place to be. Less than 48 hours after I spoke to him, the tectonic plates rumbled and cracked a little more. Rushdie told the BBC that the battle against the veil was a battle for the freedom of Muslim women like his sisters. "Sheikh" Omar Bakri retorted gloatingly from Lebanon: "Rushdie will continue living his life in hiding. Any fatwa will stand until it is fulfilled. He is always going to be worried about a Muslim reaching him." The message was old and simple and savage.

This will never be over. But Rushdie's stories rarely begin in the middle of the action. He teases out their roots, in places long ago and far away. This story is no different. Before we get to the fatwa, we must burrow into the origins of this story, which lie in a gentler, saner Islam, one that is being steadily subsumed by fanaticism across the globe. It begins in the Edenic valley of Kashmir, more than 80 years ago... I: In the beginning: A Kashmiri grandfather, and a different Islam Two of Rushdie's stories begin here: the story of his life, and the story of his shimmering latest novel, Shalimar the Clown. He describes Kashmir as "a tiny valley of no more than five million souls, landlocked, pre-industrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched thousands of feet up in the mountains, like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a giant's teeth". This was the backdrop for the meeting of Rushdie's maternal grandparents. "My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was quite small but she was very wide," he chuckles.

"I've always thought that one of the reasons my books are full of ferocious women is because of my granny." But it was his Kashmiri grandfather who would surprise Rushdie's wannabe assassins. "He was a very devout Muslim. He said his prayers every day five times a day without fail, despite the teasing of his terrible grandchildren, and he went on Haj to Mecca," he explains. "He sort of affected gruffness, but he didn't fool anybody. He was a much beloved figure in [the town of] Aligar, where he was a family doctor. He was a very familiar spectacle on the streets, bicycling around the city going about his daily rounds. When I was a little boy, I used to sit on the back, on the pillion, and see everyone waving to him." But this devout Muslim was the antithesis of the book-burners who now attack his grandson. He remains, to Rushdie, "the model of tolerance. Whenever I think about open-mindedness, I think about him. You could sit there as an 11- or 12-year-old boy and say, 'Grandfather, I don't believe in god.' And he would say, 'Really?

That's very interesting. Sit down here and tell me all about it.' And there would be no kind of attempt to ram something down your throat or criticise you. There would just be conversation." This culture of enlightenment - of free, open dispute - led his grandfather to take him to the university library, "which for me as a small boy was wonderful to explore, with those giant, towering bookstacks, with those ladders you had to climb up. In my memory, I would take out great stacks of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, which he would sign out very seriously along with his medical textbooks." And this easy rationality shaped the lives of Rushdie's parents too. His father found it confusing that the Koran was so obviously "a bit jumbled up - when you read it, the chapter suddenly changes direction, and 70 pages later, the chapter you were reading suddenly, arbitrarily continues". It was clear to him the text had been incorrectly assembled, and he wanted to go through and rearrange the text so that it made a bit more sense - the Islamic equivalent to Thomas Jefferson's rationalist adaptation of the Bible. Rushdie sips some fizzy water and says: "Now I think...

it's lucky he didn't do it." Although they were "almost totally irreligious", people who would visit the mosque three times a year, his parents at some point decided to hire a religious teacher to come to their house and educate Rushdie and his sisters. He says: "Unfortunately, they had also brought us up as extremely irreverent children. It was their fault for raising us as devilish infidels! So myself and my sisters gave this poor guy such a hard time that after about two lessons, he told my parents that he didn't know what to do. And to their immense credit, they said, 'All right, then,' and gave up." But the Kashmir of Rushdie's grandfather stands for him as an alternate Islam, a radically different way of being Muslim to the Khomeinist and Bin Ladenite head-choppers - a religion of peace, not a religion of pieces. "It's really not so long ago," he says, "and if it's not that long ago, it doesn't have to be gone for ever." As he shows in Shalimar the Clown, Kashmiri Islam was - until the 1960s - a model of pluralist tolerance.

It mingled and mixed with Hinduism, with mullahs even compromising on their austere monotheism by directing their followers to worship at the shrines of the local Hindu saints. As he puts it: "To be Kashmiri was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided." "Indian Islam was like that - and in many ways it still is," he adds. "Even at this moment, when there have been explosions in a mosque or temple - it really hasn't worked. The Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the beginning they were always very secular-minded." Whereas the radicalisation of Muslims in Britain is "dreadful", Indian Muslims "are a model which could be beneficially studied about how you show a minority community that their interests are best served by secular democracy, and not by religious communal politics. Because if you play the game of religious communal politics, you will always be outnumbered. That was the argument Nehru and Gandhi took to India's religious minorities, and it worked." His grandfather's pluralist, peaceful Kashmir has withered over the past 40 years under the burning heat of rival fundamentalisms.

In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie uses the story of the shredding of Kashmir's secularism - of the metaphorical death of his grandfather - as a microcosm of a larger story, the collapse of the secular ideal across the world that has nearly consumed Rushdie himself. After the partition of India, Kashmir found itself trapped between the two new nations, rubbing like a bed-sore. The valley had a Muslim majority, so many people thought it logically should have gone to the new Muslim state of Pakistan. But Kashmir's Hindu ruler decided to stay with India, because he thought her secular traditions were best able to prevent the valley breaking down into the ethnic cleansing that was causing the new border to haemorrhage so much blood. And so the sharp wedge of communal grievance entered Kashmir. The mild, mystical Sufi brand of Islam practised in the valley was gradually displaced by an austere Arab version - Islam 3.0. The Indian government reacted with crazed violence, treating every Kashmiri Muslim as a potential insurgent, and even using mass rape as a way to "break" the population.

The Muslim population became more fundamentalist, the Indians ramped up the violence again - and on and on, in an intensifying tango of death. In the novel, Rushdie serves up the response of the Indian government to Kashmiri separatism as "a case study in how to fuck it up". The novel is littered with lines that could have been uttered by an American general from the bloody sands of Iraq - endless bragging about how many insurgents have been "taken out", followed by confused confessions that this isn't bringing down the overall amount of violence. "The trouble is, you don't even have to reach for it," he says. "It's so obvious." He fears that - in part as a result of this - "the good guys are losing the battle within Islam. There's no question. The Islam that now exists is not the Islam that I grew up with." All over the novel, there drift bleak, depressive clouds where Rushdie seems to fear that his grandfather's Kashmir - and the other brief patches of peace in human history - are only short breaks in the story of a species determined to tear itself apart.

One character laments: "Maybe tyranny, forced conversions, temple-smashing, iconoclasm, persecution and genocide were the norms and peaceful coexistence was an illusion... Maybe peace was his opium pipe-dream." Another comments that "the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race" is "the inevitable triumph of illusion over reality." As he hears these quotes, Rushdie nods. "Look at history. It's not the account of a species at peace." As he says this, Rushdie looks into the distance with a dreamy sadness, as though he is still riding pillion on his grandfather's bicycle, watching his world and his Islam creakily pedal into oblivion. II: "It's not just about Palestine. It's about pork sandwiches, short skirts and kissing too" In the long shadow of the World Trade Centre, Rushdie's story - of an Islam spiralling into spite - began to look different. It was no longer possible to dismiss him as an exception; he became a parable. For two decades, he has been scrambling to discover the moral to his story, endlessly tracking the "labyrinthine paranoia of the jihadi mind" as it tried to shred the secular values he knew and loved.

The Satanic Verses was his first attempt to understand the new hybrid-humans midwifed by an age of mass migration - to ask what happens to the austere values of the ninth century Arabian desert when they are plunged into the swirling chaos of 20th-century London. In Shalimar the Clown, he ramps up this black exploration, creating a hero who stabs a "blasphemous" novelist in the neck and then heads to a jihadi training camp high in the Afghan hills. For a time, Rushdie was optimistic about what would emerge from this great churn of people across the globe. He became the poet laureate of mongrelisation, a writer who rejoiced that "everywhere was now part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual, discrete." In 1985, he wrote - with soaring hope - that "the effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places...

people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by their otherness." But the gloriously disembodied, pan-national ideology that emerged from this swirl turned out to be his nemesis: Islamism. It is one of the many ironies in Rushdie's irony-strewn life. He sees now that as well as softening and secularising Islam for some, this uprooting has hardened Islam into a sharpened spike for more. The mass uprooting he celebrated helped to create the Islamist pining for a fictitious lost purity that is trying to kill him, a desperate quest to recreate the Mecca of Mohammed in the world's cold concrete jungles: "I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare as well as a dream." Rushdie sees his career as falling into three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands - India and Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the journey across water to the West. "And now I think that the third act is to say, 'All right, all that happened,'" he explains.

"The world has become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we live in its aftermath - now what?" He fears that many people are wilfully misunderstanding the new Islamist virus that has spread through this new world. "People have been so knocked off balance by what's going on that their normally well-functioning moral sense seems to have lost its footing." After 18 years in the Islamist cross-hairs, Rushdie wants - needs - people to understand that this new Islamic fundamentalism is not simply the lump sum of all the bad things the West has done to Muslims, reflected back at us. At the time of the fatwa, Rushdie was widely known as a fierce and fearsome critic of US foreign policy, a man who condemned Israel's "monstrous" occupation of Palestinian lands, a man who damned Margaret Thatcher as " Mrs Torture" and warned that "British society has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism". He risked his life traipsing through the jungles of Nicaragua to expose Ronald Reagan's illegal funding of a horde of neo-fascist guerrillas trying to topple the country's elected government. It made no difference.

He had questioned the Official Story of Islam, trying to open it up to the mixed, metaphorical dream-worlds of the modern metropolis - and for that, he had to be butchered. "It's one thing to criticise the way in which the American government is behaving, or the British government, and I have a lot of criticisms of that - in fact, nothing but criticisms," he says now. "But it's another thing to fail to see that an enemy actually exists and is extremely serious about what he wishes to do. "If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qa'ida by one jot. It's not what they're after," he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. "Yes, it's a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there's an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it's not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you're on the same side as them.

If you don't want that, you're not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left." Within this Talibanist morality, there is room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed "homosexual". "One of the great untold stories of al-Qa'ida is that they are all these men who fuck little boys. They all have these disciples who they're ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they're also enjoying. For a while, then they go off - and they have their wives and families at home. It's like Classical Greece." Does he think Osama bin Laden has done it? "I wouldn't like to say," he says tactfully. "He's an Arab, he's not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he's another story..." He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen.

But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. "One of the things that's commonly said by Islamists is that it's acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die - that's all bin Laden wants you to do. It's not just about Iraq, it's about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you're not married to." He pauses. "It's about life." It horrifies Rushdie that so many people in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or an end to the occupation of Iraq. As he says this, I blurt out a repellent question: was there a small part of him on September 11 that felt almost relieved - that thought: "Now they'll understand"? He pauses, a long pause, the only one in this interview. Have I offended him? But he answers with the same contemplative calm as before. "It wasn't, actually.

What an awful thing to think. But... but I remember after 9/11 that a lot of people did finally get it, and I remember thinking - it's a shame that 3,000 people had to die for something pretty obvious to get through people's heads." III: The quiet American, and the art of slitting our own throats Rushdie has looked down the barrel of Islamism, smelt its cordite, and survived. So he is perpetually being asked - how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs, our cities? How do we scrape meaning from his misery? "When people ask me how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable - satire, irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not? "But you see it every day, this surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests.

He mentions that the entire British media - from the BBC down - placed itself in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons episode. "What I fear most is that, when we look back in 25 years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these countries is because I love the way people live here." Rushdie sees surrender stamped on every one of the "faith schools" being constructed by Tony Blair. "To say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion... it's just crazy," he says. It will only reinforce the sealing off of Muslims from the world that is symbolised by the veil, which he sees as a hideous anti-feminist shroud, "a one-woman tent". And he has another blast at Blair: looking to the United States as our anti-Islamist saviour is, he explains, a "terrible mistake. America, like all superpowers, uses only the criterion of self-interest.

That's the way in which a superpower operates, whether it's the Soviet Union or the United States. The criterion is what serves the interests of the power. When that coincides with what we call liberal democratic values then, yeah, it will be on that side. But superpowers of every stripe have a history of installing puppets which will serve their interests. Whether it's in Nicaragua, or the Shah of Iran. You can't look to a superpower as a moral arbiter, because its job is not morality. Its job is the preservation of its sphere of influence." I ask what he thinks about Christopher Hitchens' belief that the US has become a Jeffersonian superpower, bent on spreading democracy across the globe. "It's not true. It's just not true," he says. "You know, I met [Paul] Wolfowitz at Christopher's house on one occasion. And Wolfowitz turned out to be a really nice man - very charming, extremely intelligent, quite self-critical. Many things that you might not have expected him to be.

But false idealism, as we know from Graham Greene, can be fantastically self-destructive." So Wolfowitz, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense, is Alden Pyle, the Quiet American, wreaking havoc in the name of righteousness? "Yes. I do think that someone in the name of virtue can do terrible damage, for entirely virtuous reasons. But I've never seen great power as having a moral dimension." Just after we meet, it is estimated by The Lancet that 650,000 Iraqis have been killed due to Quiet Americans (and Brits). And the curse of amoral nuclear might applies to another country Rushdie knows well - Pakistan. He says the situation there is "scary, extremely scary" - much more so than the Iranian near-bomb that rivets our headlines. His old country is, he says, "one assassination away from having Islamic fanatics in charge of a functioning nuclear weapon, which they may not mind using". Rushdie feels sick to be "put into the position of hoping that Pervez Musharraf [the country's dictator] has a long and healthy life just because - what is the old rhyme? Keep a hold of nurse so you don't get something worse?

Because behind Musharraf there is the possibility of something much worse. He's an arsehole, a dictator, no better than Zia, but in the ISI [the Pakistani security services] there are people much worse, who want a very radical Islamist state." And there is a serious, searing danger they will wage war with India to reclaim - our conversation has come full circle - Kashmir. It seems a cruelly bleak irony to end on: the possibility of his grandfather's beloved symbol of peace, love and understanding, morphing in one lifetime into the likeliest cause of nuclear war anywhere on earth. It's our final note: his symbol of pluralism and tolerance, reduced to the brink of becoming a smoking radioactive husk. As we walk out on to the street, exchanging jangling pleasantries after a gruelling conversation, it seems odd - disturbing - to see him walking into a car alone. As he drives away, I think of an old quote Rushdie is fond of. In Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December, the central character hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines the barking is the dog's protest against the jarring limitations of dog experience.

"For God's sake," the dog is saying, "open the universe a little more!" That, too, is Rushdie's message in this fight between the democratic-Muslim ideals of his grandfather and the psychotic-Muslim delusions of his assassins. It is a fight between people who want to open the universe a little more, and those who want to shrivel the universe into the stultified vision of one book and one man who lived in a desert more than a millennium ago. Salman Rushdie (Author of Midnight's Children) Fiction , Children's Influences edit data Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to protests from Muslims in several countries, some of which were violent.

Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to litera Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to protests from Muslims in several countries, some of which were violent. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature", which "thrilled and humbled" him.

In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University. Joseph Anton - Salman Rushdie. - Daedalus Books Online Description (Named one of the Best Books of 2012 by London's Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Seattle Times, the Kansas City Star, and Newsweek) The author of Midnight's Children and winner of the Booker of Bookers and many other of the world's most prestigious literary awards, Salman Rushdie is most widely known for The Satanic Verses, the 1988 novel that was banned in many Islamic countries. Most of the furor was sparked when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious decree that Rushdie and his publishers should be killed on sight. And while this action chilled Western and Muslim relations around the world, for Rushdie personally it led to years of hiding, moving from house to house with the constant presence of armed police, and living under an alias, Joseph Anton. More than a memoir, Joseph Anton is a frank, profound, sometimes surprisingly funny examination of the inalienable right toï¿½and vital need forï¿½free speech.

"A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie's work throughout his career."ï¿½NYTimes "Extraordinary.... Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between ... moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposingï¿½at all costsï¿½any curtailment on a writer's freedom."ï¿½Boston Globe "Rushdie accomplishes many wondrous and momentous feats in this profound and galvanizing memoir. He shares the now strangely foreshadowing fact that his ardent storyteller father invented their last name, paying tribute to Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Spanish Arab philosopher who argued for rationalism over Islamic literalism. He explains how, decades later, when British protection officers asked him to come up with an alias, really a nom de guerre, Rushdie concocted Joseph Anton in homage to Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. His first fictions, he observes, were the upbeat letters he sent to his parents in India, concealing his boarding-school miseries in cold and racist 1960s England.

He learned to focus on his inner life, cherish kindred spirits, and navigate adversity, skills that served him well after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa, sentencing Rushdie to death for writing The Satanic Verses. Rushdie tells the full, astonishing, and necessary story of his 13 hellish years of threats, risk, and protective isolation in a passionately detailed, sardonically witty, and intensely dramatic third-person chronicle of a landmark battle in the war for liberty in the Muslim world. Forthright about his personal struggles and immensely grateful to all who championed his cause, Rushdie elucidates what literature does for us and why artistic and intellectual freedoms truly are matters of life and death."ï¿½Booklist (starred review) You might also like:

Question: The publication of which book by Salman Rushdie led to threats on his life by Ayatollah Khomeini?
Answer: The Satanic Verses