LIVE from the NYPL Presents Salman Rushdie

In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Salman Rushdie discusses his new memoir Joseph Anton which chronicles the years he spent in hiding after being sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini for writting The Satanic Verses, a novel accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet, and the Quran." Rushdie explains the his struggle for support and understanding and of how he regained his freedom.

[MrSussify]

I think that although this idea of the Satanic Verses in Islamic tradition is undeniable, it is important to note that that was not the source of the problem. Contrarily, it was the sexulisation of Muhammed and his wives, that was considered blasphemous.

For Salman to have been ignorant of the possibility of this arising as a problem is a disingenuous claim. In fact, his friend and fellow novelist Hanif Kureshi is on video inadvertently confessing that he first heard of the novel from Salman himself, who said it might cause a bit of trouble in a passing remark. Unfortunately it did. For him to have predicted a fatwa that broke the parameters of international law, on behalf of a country, against him personally, well lets face it, Nostra-fucking-damus couldn't have predicted that. I'm of muslim descent and like Salman I'm a Brit, one of the things that upset me is that it was at a time in Britain where we and other fringe ethnic communities had really struggled to become accepted within British society, and were just about getting there.

The Afro-Caribbean community were prevalent in entertainment and sport, whereas we were simply not part of the cultural scene. Salman was somebody that we could have really have been proud of as one of our own, though he chose to sever ties with us inextricably which was a shame. Of course, he was perfectly entitled to write the book and indeed to have gone even further had he so wished. What an essay, I'll shut up now!