Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie (1947- ), British novelist of Indian descent, born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and educated at Cambridge University. His early publications include the novels Grimus (1974), Midnight's Children (1981), an allegory of modern India, and Shame (1983), in which he employed fantasy and dreams in a Surrealist style. Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was an unexpected critical and popular success. He also wrote a report on his travels in Nicaragua, The Jaguar Smile (1987), and in 1991 he published a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories.

In 1988 Rushdie published The Satanic Verses, a highly acclaimed novel combining fantasy, philosophical ruminations, and comic aspects. The work aroused the ire of Muslims, who considered it a blasphemous attack on the Koran, Muhammad, and the Islamic faith. As a result of demonstrations, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia banned the work. In 1989 Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared that Rushdie and everyone involved in the book's publication should be put to death, and Khomeini's followers offered a bounty, which reached $5 million in 1992, for Rushdie's death. Although Rushdie offered an apology and a formal statement of his adherence to Islam, the fatwa was not lifted, and he remained in hiding, making isolated and unscheduled, though increasingly frequent, appearances and allowing a few interviews. In September 1998 the Iranian government made a statement lifting the death threat, although some Muslims still regarded it as irrevocable, and Rushdie returned to normal life. The controversy was reignited in 2007, however, when the author was awarded a knighthood prompting statements of condemnation from Iran and in the Pakistani parliament. His first adult novel since The Satanic Verses, The Moor’s Last Sigh, was published in 1995, and caused controversy in Mumbai, since it apparently satirized a prominent politician there. He followed this with two novels largely set in the United States, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), about the global influence of American popular culture, and Fury (2001), in which a doll maker, fearing because of the “fury” within him that he might harm his wife and child, deserts his family to seek a new life in New York. In Shalimar the Clown (2005), a novel ranging from Los Angeles to the disputed Asian territory of Kashmir, a Kashmiri militant takes bloody revenge on the American diplomat who cuckolded him.