They went to an inn called the Lygon Arms in the Cotswolds. He was whisked away in an armored Jaguar whose windows wouldn’t open-he discovered this at a McDonald’s drive-through-with a protection team: Stan, Benny, Dennis, and Mick. HidingThe Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police met with Rushdie the next day, and told him he couldn’t go home.

“I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he said.ģ. Another travel writer and novelist, Paul Theroux, sat behind him. He did an interview at CBS, then went to a memorial service for his friend, the writer Bruce Chatwin. He left his house and wouldn’t return for another three years. “Marianne was a fine writer and a beautiful woman, but he had been discovering things he didn’t like,” he wrote. He and his second wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins, hadn’t been getting along, and days later she told him she was unhappy in the marriage. Rushdie heard about it from a BBC reporter who called him at his home in London: “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” “It doesn’t feel good,” Rushdie replied.

14, 1989, a few months after the publication of The Satanic Verses, the spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, called for the execution of Rushdie, calling his novel blasphemous against Islam. he would find out exactly how good a story it was,” Rushdie wrote.Ģ. ‘Satanic Verses’ In 1966 while studying history at Cambridge, Rushdie learned about the “Satanic Verses.” They were verses that Muhammad said were given to him by the Devil, disguised as the Archangel, and should be expunged from the Quran: “Have you thought on al-Lat and al-Uzza, and, thirdly, on Manat, the other? They are Exalted Birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.” But why did the prophet accept the first revelation as true? Could there be other mistakes? “Good story, he thought.

Novelist joseph anton