Admire Rushdie as a writer and a champion – but don’t forget he is a man of flesh and blood

‘It is a tragedy that Rushdie had to work so hard to get away from the fatwa as both a physical threat and a professional one.’ Photograph: Grant Pollard/Invision/AP

In a 2017 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David launches his idea for a new show on Jimmy Kimmel’s talkshow. It is to be called Fatwa! The Musical – a Broadway rendering of the Salman Rushdie affair. This angers an ayatollah in Iran, who issues a fatwa on David’s life. All his backers vanish, he walks around in a disguise unable to live his life, and hires an overly paranoid, aggressive bodyguard, who also has very demanding taste in food and thread counts.

Fed up, David seeks out, and is granted an audience with Salman Rushdie. In a terrific coup, the man who receives David is played by Rushdie himself. Rushdie sits David down, chides him for being afraid and tells him the biggest secret about being the subject of a fatwa – “fatwa sex”.