“To be famous for the wrong thing is a terrible fate,” Salman Rushdie told an interviewer in 2002. He was referring to the fatwa calling for his execution, issued by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, after Rushdie’s novel
The Satanic Verses had inflamed anger in the Muslim world. Rushdie has long lamented the way the fatwa has overshadowed his literary achievements, but as he sat down for an onstage interview in Chautauqua, New York, on 12 August 2022, he almost felt liberated from the weight of Khomeini’s decree. “I had just about managed it,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir
Knife. “When the last few books were published, people finally stopped asking me about
The Satanic Verses. And now here I am, dragged back into that unwanted subject.”
Read the rest of my review at Sight & Sound.
