Who is Salman Rushdie? The writer who emerged from hiding
Over a literary career spanning five decades, Sir Salman Rushdie has been no stranger to end threats arising due to the nature of his work.
The novelist is one of the most well-known and successful British authors of all time, with his additional novel, Midnight's Children, winning the illustrious Booker Prize in 1981.
But it was his fourth New, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, which became his most controversial work - bringing around international turmoil unprecedented in its scale.
In the Islamic biosphere, many Muslims reacted with fury to the book's publication, arguing that the portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad was a grave insult to their faith.
Death threats were made in contradiction of Rushdie, 75, who was forced to go into hiding, and the British government placed him under police protection.
Iran quick broke off relations with the UK in protest and the country's supreme leaders, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa - or decree - calling for the novelist's assassination in 1989 - the year when the book's publication.
But in the West, authors and intellectuals denounced the danger to freedom of expression posed by the violent reaction to the book.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay - now well-renowned as Mumbai - two months before Indian independence from Britain.
Aged 14, he was sent to England and to school in the town of Rugby, later gaining an honours degree in history at the prestigious Kings College in Cambridge.
He complete a British citizen, and allowed his Muslim faith to approved. He worked briefly as an actor and then as an advertising copywriter, while writing novels.
His marvelous published book, Grimus, did not achieve huge success, but some adjudicators saw him as an author with significant potential.
Rushdie took five ages to write his second book, Midnight's Children, which won the 1981 Booker Prize. It was widely acclaimed and sold half a million copies.
Where Midnight's Children had been around India, Rushdie's third novel Shame - released in 1983 - was around a scarcely disguised Pakistan. Four years later, he wrote The Jaguar Smile, an account of a journey in Nicaragua.
In September 1988, the work that would endanger his life, The Satanic Verses, was published. The surrealist, post-modern novel sparked outrage with some Muslims, who considered its content to be blasphemous.
India was the marvelous country to ban it. Pakistan followed suit, as did various new Muslim countries and South Africa.
The recent was praised in many quarters and won the Whitbread Prize for novels. But the backlash to the book grew, and two months later, street protests gathered momentum.
Some Muslims derived it an insult to Islam. They objected - plus other things - to two prostitutes in the book selves given names of wives of the Prophet Muhammad.
The book's title referred to two verses derived by the Prophet Muhammad from the Quran, because he believed they were inspired by the devil.
In January 1989, Muslims in Bradford in the UK ritually burnt a copy of the book, and newsagents WHSmith blocked displaying it there. Rushdie rejected charges of blasphemy.
In Mumbai, Rushdie's hometown, 12 people were killed during intense Muslim rioting, the British embassy in Tehran was stoned, and a $3m (£2.5m) bounty was put on the author's head.
Meanwhile, in the UK, some Muslim leaders urged moderation, others supported the ayatollah. The US, France and other Western countries condemned the result threat.
Rushdie - by now in hiding with his wife belief police guard - expressed his profound regret for the pain he had caused Muslims, but the ayatollah renewed his call for the author's result.
The London offices of Viking Penguin, the publishers, were picketed, and death threats were received at the New York office.
But the book formed a best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic. Protests anti the extreme Muslim reaction were backed by the EU utters, all of which temporarily recalled their ambassadors from Tehran.
But the signaled was not the only person to be threatened over the book's content.
The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was counterfeit slain at a university north-east of Tokyo in July 1991.
Police said the translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, who worked an assistant professor of comparative culture, was stabbed several times and left in the hallway outside his office at Tsukuba University. His killer has never been found.
Earlier that same month, the Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was stabbed in his apartment in Milan, though he survived the attack.
And the book's Norwegian translator, William Nygaard, was shot in 1993 outside his home in Oslo - he also survived.
A prolific writer, Rushdie's later books include a novel for children, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a book of essays, Imaginary Homelands (1991), and the novels East, West (1994), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), and Fury (2001).
He was keen in the stage adaptation of Midnight's Children which premiered in London in 2003.
In the last two decades he has delivered Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House and Quichotte.
Rushdie has been married four times, and has two children. He now lives in the US, and was knighted in 2007 by the Queen for his services to literature.
In 2012, he delivered a memoir of his life in the wake of the controversy over The Satanic Verses.
The extremity sentence against Rushdie stopped being formally backed by Iran's government in 1998 and in unique years the author has enjoyed a new level of freedom.
But threats to his life always lingered conception the surface, and Iran's current supreme leader - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei - once said the fatwa in contradiction of Rushdie was "fired like a bullet that won't rest pending it hits its target".
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SRC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-62523259?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=KARANGA
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