This was always one’s worst fear for Salman Rushdie: the festival crowd, the vulnerable writer on stage, the buzz of audience anticipation, and then the horrifying irruption of senseless medieval fury.
Ever since the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa placed him under sentence of death on Valentine’s day 1989, Rushdie has lived with the dread of violent Islamist retribution. But he has, over time, conducted himself with such courage and distinction that the literary world came to forget the murderous frenzy aroused by his novel The Satanic Verses.
