And I immediately - the moment I left that room in which I'd had that meeting - I began to feel physically ill because I understood that I'd in some way betrayed myself. 'I think it actually reads like something that an inquisition would make you sign,' he says.

In all that time, Rushdie says, his weakest point came around year two, when he tried to compromise with a group of Islamic leaders in London by negotiating a statement that said, among other things, that he believed there was no god but Allah and that he would not issue a paperback version of The Satanic Verses. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And so, deprived of one nationality, I retreated into literature - which is, you could say, my other country - and chose this name from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov: Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov equals Joseph Anton.'Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Joseph Anton Subtitle A Memoir Author Salman Rushdie 'And I was asked to make it not an Indian name. 'The police asked me to come up with a pseudonym, partly because I needed to rent properties and so on, and obviously couldn't do it in my own name,' he says. He tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that Joseph Anton was an alias he created for himself when he was forced into hiding. Today, Rushdie is again living in the open, and he has finished a memoir about the experience, called Joseph Anton. Rushdie, who was born in India but lived in England at the time, went into hiding. Bounties were offered and translators and others were attacked, some even murdered.

In 1989, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling for the death of the author and anyone associated with the book's publication. In 1988, Salman Rushdie published a novel, The Satanic Verses, that many Muslims declared to be offensive, whether they'd read it or not. The recent violence sparked by the film Innocence of Muslims recalls a very different controversy from more than 20 years ago: Salman Rushdie's other novels include Midnight's Children, Shame and Luka and the Fire of Life.

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