"Do not want to live in hiding," Salman Rushdie says after spending decades in the shadow of the death penalty

Paris: After decades spent in the shadow of a death sentence handed down by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Salman Rushdie calmly challenges the challenge. "I do not want to live in hiding," he told AFP during a visit to Paris.

The novelist's life changed forever on February 14, 1989, when the Iranian spiritual leader ordered Rushdie's execution after calling his novel "The Satanic Verses" blasphemous. Like a kind of overthrown valentine, Tehran renewed the fatwa year after year.

Rushdie, who is according to some of the greatest writer that India has produced since Tagore, has spent 13 years under a false name and under the constant protection of the police.
<! –

->

"I was 41 at the time, now I'm 71. Everything is fine now," he said in September.
"We live in a world where the subject is changing very quickly, and it is a very old subject.There are now many other things that must be scary – and other people to kill." he added regretfully.

Rushdie stopped using a pseudonym in the months following September 11, 2001, three years after Tehran said the threat against him was "over."

However, plainclothes armed police officers sat in front of the door of his French publisher's office in Paris during an interview with AFP. Several others had taken positions in the courtyard.

Previously, at a book festival in eastern France, Rushdie had badured his audience that he was leading a "perfectly normal life" in New York, where he has lived for nearly two decades.
"I take the subway," he says.

"The Satanic Verses" was Rushdie's fifth book, he now wrote the 18th.

Entitled "The Golden House", it is about a Mumbai man who, like the author, reinvents himself in the Big Apple to try to get rid of his past. .

The dark years of riots, bomb plots and the badbadination of one of the book's translators, as well as the shootings and stabbings inflicted on two other people "have now come to an end. It looks very distant, "he said.

"Islam was not a thing, no one thought so," he explained at the time when "The Satanic Verses" was written.
"One of the things that has happened is that Westerners are more informed than they were," he added.

Despite everything, the book was very misunderstood, he insisted: "Really, it's a novel about South Asian immigrants to London."

The British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, Rushdie's friend, believes that no one "could afford today to write The Satanic Verses, let alone publish it". .

But even Kureishi, who wrote an acclaimed novel "The Black Album" about British Muslim radicals, admitted that he had never seen the controversy come when he was reading a copy. d & # 39; test.

"I did not notice anything about it that could wake up fundamentalists, I saw it as a book about psychosis, novelty and change."
Indian author and journalist Salil Tripathi of PEN International, who advocates for writers' rights, said he hoped big publishers would be brave enough to publish The Satanic Verses.

"I have not totally lost hope, but the Rushdie affair has undeniably been a mental drag, and many topics are now considered taboo," he conceded.
Today, intimidation is perpetrated by infantry rather than by governments, he said, implying that all religious clerics must now mobilize angry mbades to express their dislike for a publication.

Catch the biggest news producers and news on CNN-News18, your favorite TV news channel in English. Keep watching CNN-News18 at only 50 Paise per month. Contact your cable / DTH operator now!
* Rental fee / capacity of Rs.130 / – as charged by the cable / DTH operator can apply. ** GST extra.