Doubt Cast on Threat That Deterred Rushdie

JAIPUR, India — At an old Mughal palace accommodating what organizers called “the greatest literary show on earth,” the headliners on Sunday included Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra and Tom Stoppard. But the absence of another star, Salman Rushdie, continued to overshadow the event. A free-speech controversy has raged at the event, the Jaipur Literature Festival,…

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Imam Calls for Muslim British Armed Forces Boycott

A Birmingham Imam has said that Muslims should not fight in the British armed forces on conscientious grounds due to their presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Shaykh Asrar Rashid, a visiting cleric at the city’s mosques, also told the BBC the Queen was “a disgusting woman” for knighting author Salman Rushdie. In 1989 Iran’s leaders…

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Hanif Kureishi’s story of Islamist temptation, “The Black Album”, adapted for stage

The British writer Hanif Kureishi decided to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rushdie affair by adapting for the stage his 1995 second novel “The Black Album”. The novel is set in 1988/89 and the Rushdie affair and radicalization of young Muslims are its central themes. The Black Album charts the cultural and political development…

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20-year anniversary of fatwa on Rushdie finds him more secure, still critical of religious dogma

Accompanied by the sneers of his former fellow travelers and under the protection of his old adversary, embodied by the British secret service, Salman Rushdie went underground for ten years after the release of The Satanic Verses. He slept in windowless apartments and changed his accommodation several times a week. Often enough he woke up…

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    What happened to the Rushdie book burners?

    Twenty years ago Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa called on to kill the author Salman Rushdie after weeks of protests had been going on about one of his books. Many British Muslims despised The Satanic Verses for blaspheming the Prophet Muhammad and burned copies of Rushdie’s book on British streets. This aroused strong sentiments on all sides,…

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