A “bearded and turbaned Imam” in exile harbors “a dream of glorious return…a vision of revolution.” He plots the overthrow of his country’s wine-drinking Empress, convinced that her sin “is enough to condemn her for all time without hope of redemption.” He thunders “apostate, blasphemer, fraud.”įor the real-life imams, it seems the blasphemy was in the novel’s re-imagination of the episode that gave The Satanic Verses its name. One scene from the offending novel both reflects and prefigures the ugly reality.
“Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time,” the imam intoned several days later, “it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell.” Another absolutist ayatollah, Hassan Sanei, offered a million-dollar bounty for the blasphemer’s head.įrom that day to this, Rushdie says in the opening to his forceful third-person memoir, Joseph Anton-the pseudonym he adopted for 11 years while hiding, based on the first names of Conrad and Chekhov-the word fatwa “hung around his neck like a millstone.” Iran’s mortally ill Ayatollah Khomeini, who had never so much as seen a copy of The Satanic Verses, made the murder of its author, “along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents,” a holy obligation upon millions of believers. On Valentine’s Day 1989, the celebrated British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie received the worst review of his career: a death sentence.
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