That might not be a level at pattern. At that not that and that was the it was that i add. That. For more than 10 years Salman Rushdie was a hunted man living in hiding with a false identity and under Police Protection. The front walk calling for his execution was issued in 1989 following the publication of his book the satanic verses which was considered blasphemous. With the threat of death hanging over him rushdie changed his address 56 times during those 10 years and was the target of some 20 assassination attempts. But thats all behind him now rushdie has left england and settled in new york where he has lived for almost 20 years. I was born in what was then called bombay in india in june 147 lets just say exactly h. Weeks to the day before the end of the british empire. My father used to toe this joke which i think he told slate. Too many times about how i was born an 8 weeks later the british run away its. It was easy to see the in order to see. Nonobservant muslim family you know that religions really werent a big issue. And nor was nationality so in the little neighborhood where we lived there were i would my childhood friends were of every possible religion you know they were hindu muslim seek christian. And all that seemed completely normal. And that sense of it of everybody else is a culture being available to us it was one of the great things about growing up that. Like many children i was told many times stories by my parents my father would tell us. I mean the east indian equivalent of fairy tales the arabian nights stories and actually when you read the 1001 nights you realize that its not at all a Childrens Book its full of sex but of course my father gave me his version is adaptations of them which interested me in to read when i grew up to read the real thing and that was influential to it i never had any idea of what to do with my life except your writing so when even when i was a child. My parents often its told me that when their friends asked them asked me what do you want to do when you grow up i would not say that i want to be a. You know Airline Pilots or im astronauts i would say i want to be a rice it this is when i was like i dont know 910 years old you know so it was always the plan i never really had a plan b. And i did start rising Little Things my memory of the 1st story i ever wrote is that i went to see the movie the wizard of oz. And i came home and wrote a story called over the rainbow is a story about a boy like myself in a city like mumbai and he meets magical creatures and anyway persone was long it was a few pages long and my father said that he would have his secretary type it up so he so he did and and then he said you know if i give this to you youre going to lose it so i will look after it so he took it away and then he lost it but my parents they still thought that an english education in europe in england was the best thing they could offer me but nobody forced we you know thats to say my father said to me would i be interested to go but if i said no then i didnt have to go so they left the decision to me my mother was completely against the idea she didnt want me to go. But she also left the decision to me and and. The strange thing is that i was very happy as i said growing up in bombay you know i i liked the world of my childhood i liked my school you know i had plenty of friends. And its very hard now to understand about that young boy who was what 1212 and a half years old when this question was asked and. Why did he say yes he wanted to go you know and it seems mysterious to me that i made that decision and it suggests that there was i dont know some spirit of adventure some desire to go away and see other things. And maybe it was in part inspired by reading but if i could id read all these english Childrens Books you know and so i had a picture of england in my mind which of course was completely inaccurate england is not like a Childrens Book. The in. When i arrived i well 1st of all it was very cold but i arrived in winter january and i boy from the tropics so so just the physical fact of how cold it was it was difficult and then i discovered more disappointing things about england which was to put it in a simple word racism you know not it was the 1st time in my life that i had had that feeling or been given the feeling of being the other being the person who was not like the people who were there and and and disliked for that reason. Boys find all sorts of ways of being nasty to other boys thats true but the way they found being nasty to me was to attack me for my racial origins you know and up was i mean that was very shocking it was very shocking i didnt speak english with an english accent and and yes i mean my skin is color is relatively light and so it means that over the years i in many ways suffered less racial prejudice than other people but my background you know. But it was all around you know in the. That period of after i graduated i graduated in 1988 and you know the seventys and eightys in england were a time of quite considerable racial tension. But i had a very bad start as a writer you know when i Left University because i had decided to settle in england and not go back east i think that i was very confused about my identity as a writer but what kind of writer i was who exactly i was as a writer and and so a lot of those things that i wrote to begin with. We were floored because of that they were they were. They were very good. As working as a advertising copywriter to pay the rent and i was writing these various other projects probably 3 book length manuscripts that that i wrote in that in that time that were never published. And i mean actually now im very grateful they were published with a. Very good so there was a lot of work and failure. I published one novel that essentially nobody liked and there were various other abandoned projects that i really felt that i was i hadnt found my way and i think the question in the end was that i had to do much more introspection i had to really understand who i was and where the writing was coming from and and out of that came a desire to reclaim. What i feared might be lost territory which was which was the world id come from the world of bombay and india. And so i went back there with my small savings. And i just decided im going to stay here as long as i can and im going to travel as widely as i can im going to just try and. Get a drink this in india and i was there for an almost all quite not quite 6 months and 5 and a half months Something Like that. And by the time i came back i had a much clearer idea of what i wanted to do and out of that came about children. What the book is about is about my generation which is the generation of of freedom the generation of independence you know the the 1st generation to be born in india not under colonial rule you know for over 200 years. The british left on august the midnight of august 14th the 15th yes thats what i want to write about. And so by the time i came around to writing midnights children i i really thought this is a kind of lost charles and other if if if i can if i cant make this work that maybe i should stop but fortunately thats not what happened. It did change my life the success of midnights children it was completely unexpected so i Left University in 1988 and by the time midnights children was published up in 1901. The idea that it would become this got a global phenomenon but selling multiple millions of copies and translated into you know 50 languages and so on i would it would never have crossed my mind that that would happen is that selling rushdie. For the. Idea that they know when a brilliant book which sells them up is the funny novel for them. So it was a complete shock. And yes then you know what he did was allowed me to live by my writing. And then i was what those 34 years old at the time. Rushdie spent 5 years writing the satanic verses at the time no one could foresee the rise of islamic fundamentalism but the backlash that followed the books release was the harbinger of what was to become the dominant issue of the 21st century the spread of fanatical islamic. Before the satanic verses was published rushdie asked a few friends to read the proofs his publisher sent that rushdie had no idea the storm of the satanic verses was about to one beach. The figures i did show it to them the book the number of people who knew who knew the world at writing about and it was quite obvious that people of conservative religious views would not like the book but there they havent liked anything else i wrote either so thats not particularly different i felt that in many ways it was my most formally ambitious. Book you know it was a book where i was pushing things father that i pushed in before and i. I like that about it. The book tells of 2 passengers on a flight to london brill and saladin fall victim to a terrorist attack. As their plane explodes and they fall from the sky the 2 protagonists are transformed into archangels of good and evil the book denounces the oppression of women intolerance and violence and questions the core tenants of the islamic faith and one seen prostitutes working in a brothel take the names of the wives of the prophet in order to boost their earnings and in a thinly veiled reference to Ayatollah Khomeini the novel also depicts an ex saudi mom who during revolution returns to his home country and tyrannizes the people i knew about the rise of islamic fundamentalism in fact theres a character in the satanic verses who is who is you know who is of that kind of is a fundamentalist preacher. I think you know anyone who comes from the east who had paid attention to what was happening in the world we knew about that. And. The only reason now a lot of people who read the book say that it seems to have foreseen what was going to happen but it wasnt foreseeing it was just paying attention to what was actually happening which at that time people in the west were not paying attention and i use this metaphor of hitchcocks film the birds. Because theres this scene in the birds where there are children singing in a classroom. Outside the classroom theres the playground but theres a theres a climbing frame jungle gym and the film cuts back and forth between the 2 and 1st time good looks outside the window you see one black would come to sit on the frame and then you go back in the children singing and then you go back out and theres like 500 and and the point is that when theres just one bird sitting there doesnt mean anything its just a bird sitting on a climbing frame its only retrospectively when there are 500 goods that you begin to think oh yeah there was that 1st mud. And i think what happened in the case of what happened to the satanic verses is its it was Something Like the 1st block good. In september 1908 the publication of the satanic verses caused an instant uproar in the Muslim Community it criticized what they saw as rushdies irreverent portrayal of the prophet the book triggered a wave of protests across the arab world. I mean attacks like this against books had taken place before that against other writers of the muslim world Najib Mahfouz for example the nobel laureate. Well i think what happened in the west is that people were completely taken by surprise. There was some argument about the book you know there was some in england to play for there were some muslim priests who. Spoke up against it and thats more or less what would have happened had it not been the intervention of holy. Book came out in september nigeria aviate and the football was 6 months later for everybody a lot. On feb 14th 1909 in toronto the spiritual leader of the Islamic RevolutionAyatollah Khomeini issued a religious decree or fatwa ordering all muslims to kill the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie and his publishers for the books blasphemous attacks on islam the prophet and the koran a bounty of 25000. 00 was offered to any iranian who carried out the sentence and 7500. 00 to any muslim of another nationality he said in the name of god almighty i call on all zealous muslims to execute them quickly wherever they may find them so that no one else will dare insult islamic sanctities. But i was at home in london. And the telephone rang and it was a woman from the b. B. C. From the news radio news program. Who. I think what she said is how does it feel to know that youve been sentenced to death by the art of the who me. Its the 1st ive heard of it and i said something stupid like it doesnt feel very good and and put the phone down and then i did something even more stupid which is to run around the house locking the doors and windows as if that that it would be fired. My 1st thought was i think i think im a dead man i think i had begun to think that and then my days might be numbered in less than double figures. At the time nobody understood exactly what it might mean i had to go a Television Interview 1st c. B. S. Television in america and i was asking the journalists at the c. B. S. Office in london what do you think this means. And one of them said oh dont worry about it you know khamenei he said this is the president of the United States to death every friday you know so. So nobody knew whether to take it seriously or not. But i did and i think within 24 hours the british had also decided that they had the take this seriously and and thats when the protection was offered a night except. His literary agent andrew wylie remembers rushdies call miley said i had to ask him what a fatwa was i had never heard the word before he said he was going into hiding right away. Because. Of the next few weeks demonstrations against rushdie escalated across britain muslim communities help book burnings thousands of protestors who considered the book evil and insulting to islam demanded that it be banned the. That. In london activists burned effigies of the author while chanting allah is great and death to rushdie. A professor of islamic. Studies spoke out against rushdie in an open letter to the International Herald tribune your western readers are unable to gauge the acuteness of the blow you have dealt us he wrote what do you think the response of black americans would be if you were to mock Martin Luther king jr or the reaction of the Jewish Community if you you know just get the. You saw the director of the Islamic Center and his library and were murdered tonight on the premises of the mosque of brussels. Had apparently taken a moderate stance in the rushdie affair. Is the director of the Islamic Center. Was found dead with gunshot wounds to the head and the neck. Of the head was killed in a similar fashion he was head of the Islamic Center library he said. The t. V. Is full of blood lust im not of the hotel anymore i mean this on nameable place. There is weaponry everywhere the moment when things really changed for me was when i saw Television Coverage of the burning of the satanic verses but i thought of it my think of it no i was one of the most obscene images. With the state when khomeini intervened the narrative a changed that that i say what i thought of had up to that point been an argument. Turned into something much more dangerous. Britains biggest bookseller withdrew the satanic verses from its 430 stores on the same day the writer stephen king called the head of the chain and gave him an ultimatum if you dont sell the satanic verses you dont sell stephen king the book was back on the shelves the next day. There was some political problems which is that the thatcher government in england was aware of the fact that i had been a strong critic of the thoughts of government and so they werent particularly in love with me but on the other hand they offered the Police Protection and maintained it will be about it today a protest took place in paris with banners reading kill rushdie to get more. Death to rushdie and bar or god is great were chanted between the bow to them plus the level of public metro stations by about a 1000 demonstrators i mean you know many fish dont live for them rushdies book was a stab in the back of all this. But not all politicians and intellectuals supported rushdie John Le Carre wrote in the guardian that nobody has a god given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity. The beloved childrens author rod dollar leveled the harshest attack this kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on the top of the bestseller list he seems to be regarded as some sort of a hero to my mind hes a dangerous opportunist. Even jimmy carter whose presidency was destroyed by Ayatollah Khomeini denounced the book calling it an insult to the sacred beliefs of our muslim friends and the singer cat stevens who converted to islam in 1977 expressed disapproval of rushdies writings and support for the death sentence another critic Prince Charles said im sorry but if someone insults someone elses deepest convictions well then you shouldnt pretend to be surprised a few years later his mother Queen Elizabeth the 2nd knighted rushdie for his service to literature effigies of the queen and the author were burned at several demonstrations. On june 3rd 1909 Ayatollah Khomeini died in tehran leaving the fatwa in place. His successor i have told many declared it is incumbent on every muslim to employ everything he has to send Salman Rushdie to hell even if it means sacrificing his life. The death sentence against solomon pronounced a year ago by Ayatollah Khomeini has been reaffirmed by his successor ayatollah ali hama now a irans religious leader referred to the british writer mr rushdie as the author of the blasphemous book the satanic verses for the islamic fanatics continue to pursue Salman Rushdie the author of the satanic verses condemned to death by khomeini hes in hiding somewhe