RUSHDIE, SALMAN

born June 19, 1947, Bombay, India in full Ahmed Salman Rushdie Anglo-Indian novelist who was condemned to death by leading Iranian Muslim clerics in 1989 for allegedly having blasphemed Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses. His case became the focus of an international controversy. Rushdie was the son of a prosperous Muslim businessman in India. He was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, receiving an M.A. degree in history in 1968. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter, and his first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. His next novel, Midnight's Children (1981), an allegory about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. Like Rushdie's subsequent fiction, Midnight's Children is an allegorical fable that examines historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. The novel Shame (1983), based on contemporary politics in Pakistan, was also popular, but Rushdie's fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, encountered a different reception. Some of the bizarre adventures in this book depict a character modeled on the Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and his transcription of the Qur'an in a dubious light. After its publication in the summer of 1988, The Satanic Verses was denounced as blasphemous by outraged Muslims in Britain, and public demonstrations against the book spread to Pakistan. In 1989 the spiritual leader of revolutionary Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, publicly condemned the book and issued a fatwa (legal opinion) against Rushdie; a bounty was offered to anyone who would execute him. He went into hiding under the protection of Scotland Yard, and, although he occasionally emerged unexpectedly, sometimes in other countries, he was compelled to restrict his movements. Despite the standing death threat, Rushdie continued to write and be published, producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of essays and criticism; two collections of short stories, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and East, West (1994); and two novels, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). In 1998, after nearly a decade, the Iranian government announced it would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa against Rushdie.