‘Islamophobe’ Rushdie falls foul of the blasphemy squad
In a joint letter, the Muslim Student Association and its supporters argued that hosting Rushdie at the California liberal arts institution Claremont McKenna College was incompatible with the college’s obligations under the rubric of EDI.
After the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses, a novel which provoked widespread outrage across parts of the Muslim world, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution and offering a $3million bounty — a sentence which explicitly extended to editors, translators, and publishers involved in the book’s production and dissemination.
Over the following years, several of those individuals were violently attacked, some fatally. Among them were William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, shot multiple times outside his home; Ettore Capriolo, Rushdie’s Italian translator, stabbed in the neck, chest, and hands; and Hitoshi Igarashi, his Japanese translator, left to die in a pool of blood by a lift shaft at Tsukuba University. In 1993, a mob seeking to murder Rushdie’s Turkish translator, Aziz Nesin, set fire to the Madimak Hotel in Sivas, killing 37 people. Rushdie himself was forced into hiding.