Ahmed Salman Rushdie (b. Bombay, India, June 19, 1947)

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 633.

Ahmed Salman Rushdie

A world known even notorious writer and poet Salman Rushdie, best known for his novel The Satanic Verses (1989), a fantasy whose publication aroused the wrath of many Muslims and persuaded Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini to offer a multimillion-dollar reward for the author's assassination. Rushdie was forced to go into hiding.

Rushdie's work hinges on his many identities--an Indian Muslim who writes in English, whose family left India for Pakistan, and who now lives in England. Midnight's Children (1981), which first brought Rushdie a wide audience and won Britain's Booker Prize, is an allegory about the birth of independent India. Shame (1983) focuses on Pakistan's recent rulers. The Satanic Verses is a complex work whose two protagonists, like Rushdie, are expatriate Indians. The passages describing the birth of a religion resembling Islam are seen as blasphemous by Muslims, and the book has been banned in most Islamic countries. Despite Rushdie's denial of any intentional blasphemy, and his pubic decision in 1990 "to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it," his death sentence remained in force. He as continued to write, however, publishing both the children's tales in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and the essays in Imaginary Homelands in 1991.