Salman Rushdie
in full Ahmed Salman Rushdie
born June 19, 1947, Bombay, India
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 adventures in this
book depict a character modeled on the
Prophet Muhammad and portray both him and
his transcription of the Qurʾān in a manner
that, after the novel’s publication in the
summer of 1988, drew criticism from Muslim
community leaders in Britain, who denounced
the novel as blasphemous. Public
demonstrations against the book spread to
Pakistan in January 1989. On February 14 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,
producing Imaginary Homelands (1991), a
collection of essays and criticism; the
children’s novel Haroun and the Sea of
Stories (1990); the short-story collection
East, West (1994); and the novel The Moor’s
Last Sigh (1995). In 1998, after nearly a
decade, the Iranian government announced it
would no longer seek to enforce its fatwa
against Rushdie.
Rushdie’s subsequent novels include The
Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Fury
(2001). Step Across This Line (2002) is a
collection of essays he wrote between 1992
and 2002 on subjects from the September 11
attacks to The Wizard of Oz. Shalimar the
Clown (2005), a novel set primarily in the
disputed Kashmir region of the Indian
subcontinent, examines the nature of
terrorism. The Enchantress of Florence
(2008) is based on a fictionalized account
of the Mughal emperor Akbar.
Rushdie received the Booker Prize in 1981
for Midnight’s Children. He subsequently won
the Booker of Bookers (1993) and the Best of
the Booker (2008). These special prizes were
voted on by the public in honour of the
prize’s 25th and 40th anniversaries,
respectively. Rushdie was knighted in 2007,
an honour criticized by the Iranian
government and Pakistan’s parliament.
