Extract
Salman Rushdie.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize in 2008, a "Best of the Booker" award was created to name the best novel of all the previous Booker recipients. The winner over other favorites, including Yann Martel's life of Pi and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.
ON FEBRUARY 14, 1989, Salman Rushdie found himself at the center of a profound and violent controversy--a fatwa proclaimed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran, calling for the death of Rushdie in light of his "blasphemous" depictions of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, in his novel The Satanic Verses (1988). (Many aspects of the novel were deemed offensive, from the fact that prostitutes in the novel were named after Muhammad's wives to the confusion as to whether the title referred to the entire Qur'an rather than a specific set of verses.) The fatwa, which forced Rushdie into hiding under police protection for nine years, caused a break in diplomatic relations between Iran and the UK and sparked violence and deadly riots around the world. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Although the Iranian spiritual leader renewed the fatwa as recently as 2005, the sentence, which comes with a hefty bounty, has ...See the full content of this document
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