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Famed Indian-origin controversial writer Salman
Rushdie has started to pen down memories of his life under
threat from Islamic religious, apparently feeling that the
danger to him may have abated.
Ahlul Bayt News Agency (ABNA.ir) - Famed Indian-origin
controversial writer Salman Rushdie has started to pen down
memories of his life under threat from Islam, apparently feeling
that the danger to him may have abated.
Rushdie has began to write about what he calls his life's lost
chapter, the years he spent in hiding from the death fatwa
issued against him by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah
Khomeini.
It was on Valentine's Day in 1989 that Ayatollah Khomeini called
for the death of everyone involved in the publication of
Rushdie's fourth novel The Satanic Verses, which he said was
blasphemous. This week, at an event organised by the literary
magazine Granta, 63-year-old Rushdie confirmed that the moment
to write about his life in mufti had arrived.
“I am writing it now,” he said. “I found it kind of annoying
that other people kept offering versions of it that were all
bulls.”
During those critical years, Rushdie is believed to have lived
in 30 different locations but apart from occasional last-minute
appearance at literary gatherings, dinners and one on stage at
Wembley Stadium during a U2 gig, his exact whereabouts and
activities for most of that time remain a mystery.
He was guarded round the clock by special Branch officers at an
estimated cost of 11 million pounds.
British bookshops were bombed. A would-be assassin accidentally
blew himself up in a London hotel room, a Norwegian publisher
was shot, the novel's Japanese translator was stabbed to death
in Tokyo, 37 people died in an arson attack in Turkey aimed at a
Turkish translator.
Thousands of articles and at least six books have explored what
became known as the Rushdie affair but the author and his
friends have kept largely silent about what actually happened to
him, until now.
“I just thought it might be time to tell that story,” Rushdie
said, according to a report in The Times.
“I always for a long time did not want to tell it. First of all
I was in it and that was not likeable. Then I got out of it and
thought the last thing I want to do is put myself back in it and
think about it for the next few years. Of course there were
people telling me I should write it”
According to the report, he has written 70 pages so far.
One likely area of interest is the literary feuding over the
fatwa between Rushdie and other writers, including Germaine
Greer, John Le Carre and VS Naipaul, who publicly referred to
the death threat as “an extreme form of literary Comments
criticism”.
Source:
http://www.abna.ir
Date: 2010/07/21
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