Rushdie, Le Carré bury the hatchet
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The decades-long feud between British spy writer John le Carré and author Salman Rushdie has finally come to end just a year after Nobel laureate V.S.Naipaul ended a bitter feud with his former friend and writer Paul Theroux.
The feud, which had roots in the 1989 fatwa issued by Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against Rushdie, 65, for writing The Satanic Verses, erupted in public in a series of letter exchanges by the two writers in the Guardian newspaper 15 years ago. The vitriolic exchange of insults in a series of public letters included Rushdie describing Le Carré as “an illiterate pompous ass“ and a “dunce“ and Le Carré branding Rushdie as “self-canoniz ing“ and “arrogant.“
The feud became worse when Rushdie's friend Christopher Hitchens described Le Carré as “a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.” Le Carré in 1989, at the time of the fatwa against Rushdie, had urged the writer to stop distribution of paperback of The Satanic Verses due to the threat of harm aimed at people selling it. This was what led to 1997 slanging match between the two writers.
“In 1989, during the worst days of the Islamic attack on The Satanic Verses, Le Carré wrote an article in which he eagerly and rather pompously joined forces with my assailants,” Rushdie wrote in a letter to Guardian, after Le Carré had complained of being labelled as an “anti-Semite.”
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