How long was rushdie in hiding

Paris By Agence France-Presse. Get our Daily News Capsule Subscribe. Thank you for subscribing to our Daily News Capsule newsletter. Whatsapp Twitter Facebook Linkedin. Sign Up. Edit Profile. My decision.

They are not easy matters to speak of publicly. I should like, however, to say something about my decision to affirm the two central tenets of Islam — the oneness of God and the genuineness of the prophecy of the Prophet Muhammad —and thus to enter into the body of Islam after a lifetime spent outside it.

Although I come from a Muslim family background, I was never brought up as a believer, and was raised in an atmosphere of what is broadly known as secular humanism. I still have the deepest respect for these principles. However, as I think anyone who studies my work will accept, I have been engaging more and more with religious belief, its importance and power, ever since my first novel used the Sufi poem Conference of the Birds by Farid ud-din Attar as a model.

The Satanic Verses itself, with its portrait of the conflicts between the material and spiritual worlds, is a mirror of the conflict within myself. Offending the high priests. When George Orwell returned from Spain in , he brought with him the manuscript of Homage to Catalonia. It reflected the experiences he had gathered during the Civil War. At first, he was unable to find a publisher because a multitude of influential, left-wing intellectuals had no wish to acknowledge its shocking observations.

They did not want to accept the Stalinist terror, the systematic liquidation of anarchists, Trotskyists and left-wing socialists. Orwell himself only narrowly escaped this terror.

His stark accusations contradicted a world image of a flawless Soviet Union fighting against Fascism. During the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the Communist cadre to whom purge through liquidation became commonplace.

A fighter for Spain with an extraordinary capacity for survival. The Rushdie affair: Outrage in Oslo. The terrorist state of Iran must face the consequences of refusing to lift the fatwa that condemns Salman Rushdie, and those associated with his work, to death.

When someone, in accordance with the express order of the fatwa, attempts to murder one of the damned, the obvious consequence is that Iran must be held responsible for the crime it has called for, at least until there is conclusive proof that no connection exists.

Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, was possibly the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in 37 deaths. Log In. Contact us Sign up for newsletters. Log In Register now My account. By Laura Martin. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them. The Iranian prime minister, Mr Mir-Hossein Mousavi, pronounced today a day of mourning against the book.

The threat to Mr Rushdie's life is the latest twist in a saga of increasingly violent opposition to his book by Muslims who insist it is blasphemous about the prophet Mohammed. Last month, copies were burned in Bradford, Yorkshire, and last weekend five protesters were shot dead by police during demonstrations in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Mr Rushdie asked for police protection immediately after the Ayatollah's threat. Last night Scotland Yard would only say the threat was being taken seriously. The office of the book's publishers, Viking, had police on duty and cars were being checked.