Encyclopedia of Islam

Further reading: Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi Past and 

Present, East and West (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000); Jalal 

al-Din Rumi, The Masnavi, Book One. Translated and 

edited by Jawid Mojaddedi (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2004); Annemarie Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: 

A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (London: East-

West Publications, 1978).

Rushdie, Salman

 

(1947–  )  award-winning 

author who was forced into hiding from 1989 to 1998 

due to a death sentence issued by Ayatollah Khomeini

Salman Rushdie is an acclaimed novelist and 

critic who became a household name after his 

1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, drew protests from 

numerous Muslims and Muslim groups because of 

its treatment of m

Uhammad

, his wives, and com-

panions. Ayatollah r

Uhollah

 k

homeini

 (d. 1989), 

i

ran

’s conservative religious leader, pronounced 

a 

FatWa

 (legal opinion) in 1989 that sentenced 

Rushdie to death, and, as a result, Rushdie was 

forced into hiding from 1989 to 1998. As of this 

writing, Rushdie lives in the U

nited

 s

tates

, divid-

ing his time between Los Angeles, Atlanta, and 

New York City.

Rushdie was born to Muslim parents in Bom-

bay, i

ndia

, and educated at the Cathedral School 

there. In 1961 he left India to attend Rugby, a 

prestigious boarding school in England. Rushdie 

then attended King’s College, Cambridge, where 

he wrote a paper on Muhammad and the origins 

of Islam for the first part of his history exami-

nations. Early literary influences on Rushdie 

included the Arabic classic The Thousand and One 

Nights (also known as the a

rabian

  n

ights

) and 

the Urdu (an Indian language which is the official 

language of Pakistan) poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (d. 

1984), a family friend.

Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus (1975), a varia-

tion of the medieval Sufi (mystic) poet Farid 

al Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, was a 

commercial and critical failure. His second novel, 

Midnight’s Children (1981), about the lives of 

1,001 children born at the stroke of midnight on 

India’s independence from Britain, won him criti-

cal acclaim, including the 1981 Booker Prize. In 

that book Rushdie’s satirical portrayal of India’s 

leader Indira Gandhi resulted in a lawsuit that was 

resolved when a sentence considered particularly 

hurtful by Gandhi was omitted from subsequent 

editions of the novel. His third novel, Shame

(1983), satirized Pakistani politics (and politi-

cians such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto [d. 1979] and 

General Zia al Haqq [d. 1988]) in the way that its 

predecessor had satirized Indian politics. Clearly, 

Rushdie knew much about Islam, Muslims, and 

South Asian politics and culture.

The Satanic Verses (1988) was Rushdie’s fourth 

novel, and it dealt with the theme of migration, 

of being brown in England, and the multiple 

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