Excerpt
SUMMARY: In his new memoir, Salman Rushdie recounts, in the third person, his upbringing as a secular Muslim trying to understand his religion, as well as living under fatwa, a period when he says he discovered his own resilience. Jeffrey Brown talks to the author about recent clashes over free speech and Islamic ideology.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And finally tonight, one of the world's leading storytellers who became part of one of the world's most dramatic stories.
It was in 1989 that Salman Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" was denounced by Muslims as blasphemy against the Prophet Mohammed, igniting a fire storm.
The book was banned and violent protest took place in parts of the Islamic world. Bookstores in Britain that carried it were bombed. And within several years, the book's Japanese translator was killed, its Norwegian publisher attacked.
Ayatollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of Iran's Islamic Republic, issued a decree, or fatwa, calling his Rushdie's death.
The author went into hiding for nearly a decade before the fatwa was lifted in 1998. He's lived in New York since 2000.
Now Salman Rushdie has written a memoir titled "Joseph Anton," the code name he used both on two of his favorite authors, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
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