Later that month, a Guinean-born Lebanese man, calling himself Mustafa Mazeh, blew himself up in a hotel in Paddington, west London, preparing a bomb to kill Rushdie.

In June 1989 Khomeini died, but the fatwa lived on under his successor, the current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and there appeared to be a renewed effort to put it into effect. In February 1989, Rushdie expressed remorse, saying: ‘‘I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam.” The words had little impact, however. Western intellectuals mostly flocked to Rushdie’s defence, depicting the issue as a litmus test of the west’s readiness to stand up for the principle of freedom of expression in the face of lethal threats.īookshops in the UK and US soon found themselves having to urgently decide where they stood on that matter, in the face of a wave of firebombings of stores that continued to sell it. In 2012 he published a memoir of his life in hiding under that title.

Rushdie went into hiding and lived for several years, much of the time in a remote farmhouse in Wales, under the alias Joseph Anton, celebrating his literary heroes Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Salman Rushdie went into hiding for several years under the alias Joseph Anton. Iran broke off relations with Britain over the issue. An Iranian religious foundation offered a $1m bounty, $3m if an Iranian carried out the killing. The fatwa effectively carved the death threat into stone, making it impossible to erase.

The day after those riots, 14 February 1989, the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, calling on all Muslims to execute not just Rushdie but everyone involved in the book’s publication. There were riots in Srinagar and Kashmir. In Islamabad, six people were killed in a mob attack on the US cultural centre in the Pakistani capital to protest against the book. One Muslim-majority country after another banned the book, and in December thousands of Muslims demonstrated in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and burned a pile of the books. He had no idea of the tsunami of outrage that was to overshadow the rest of his life, or that he was about to become a geopolitical booby trap.īy October 1988, he already needed a bodyguard in the face of a deluge of death threats, cancelling trips and hunkering down. The Indian-born author had come from a career as an advertising copywriter, confecting slogans such as “naughty but nice” for cream cakes, for example.

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