Rushdie on Verses and target audience
Salman Rushdie
Over two decades after Satanic Verses sparked a never-ending controversy and provoked a fatwa for his head, author Salman Rushdie has only one thing to say to his detractors: ‘I did not write it for the mullahs’. The India-born controversial writer who has lived for years under the shadow of his 1988 book, now liberally jokes about the whole issue. Speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Art in Wales, the 64-year-old author said books are intended for people who like them. Joking about the fatwa issue during an interaction, he said he did not write it “for the mullahs. I didn’t think they were my target audience”.
“The only thing worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review from the Ayatollah Khomeini,” he was quoted as saying by the Telegraph newspaper.
The author, who is best known for his memorable Booker-winning Midnight’s Children, said the reason why books endure is not that people dislike them or that there is a controversy around them. “The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It’s the only reason why books last. It’s the people who love books that make them last, not the people who attack them”.
Satanic Verses sparked widespread outrage among Muslims and even led to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issuing a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989. However, controversy over the book never died down. Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai and moved to Britain as a child and now lives in the United States, says his experiences led him to explore the issue of migration in his award-winning books. Speaking at the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, Rushdie said: “We live in the age of migration. There are more people now living in countries in which they were not born than in the rest of human history combined.” In a conversation with Peter Florence, founder of the festival, Rushdie said: “The end of the monoculture is the phenomenon of our generation.”
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