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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