Salman Rushdie  

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One of the first well-known fatwas was proclaimed in 1989 by the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, against Salman Rushdie over his novel The Satanic Verses. The reason was an allegedly blasphemous statement taken from an early biography of Muhammad, regarding the incorporation of pagan goddesses into Islam’s strongly monotheistic structure. Khomeini died shortly after issuing the fatwa. In 1998 Iran stated it is no longer pursuing Rushdie’s death; however, that decree was again reversed in early 2005 by the present theocrat, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In 1991, Rushdie's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo, and his Italian translator was beaten and stabbed in Milan. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was shot and severely injured in an attack outside his house in Oslo. Thirty-seven guests died when their hotel in Sivas, Turkey was torched by locals protesting against Aziz Nesin, Rushdie's Turkish translator.

In February 2016, in celebration of the anniversary of the fatwa against Rushdie, Iranian state-run median agencies added $300,000 to the estimated $3.3 Million bounty for the death of Rushdie.

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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his early fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism mixed with historical fiction, and 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 (1988), was at the center of The Satanic Verses controversy, with protests from Muslims including Yusuf Islam (formerly known as Cat Stevens) in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with Rushdie facing death threats and a fatwā (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, in February, 1989. In response to the call for him to be killed, Rushdie spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically, but was outspoken on the fatwā's censoring effect on him as an author and the threat to freedom of expression it embodied.



Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Salman Rushdie" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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