Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Socrates of the 'Global Village'

When the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses was first published in 1989, the book ignited an international firestorm, replete with book burnings, massive public protests, and even the issuance of a fatwa, or a religious death sentence against Rushdie by Iran's hard-line religious leader, then-Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, sixteen years have past, Rushdie is still alive, and writing. Since that time, also, many factions of the Muslim world have come to seem, to whole Western nations, like the United States and others, fully as intractable as they must have seemed to Rushdie back then. Within The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie dared to ask hard questions about such sparsely-discussed issues as the origins of Islam and the basis of the entire Islamic belief system. For many non-Muslims in 1989, the controversy over The Satanic Verses likely seemed both strange...
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