PEN World Voices Archive: Salman Rushdie on the Fatwa

From the archive (2007): Writer, Salman Rushdie answers a journalist question on his advice for the world about living under the fatwa that called for is death by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. The decree was made after his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), had a fictitious dream sequence of the Prophet Mohammad that some purported as weakness and was deemed heresy to the extremists in the Islamic world. On August 12, 2022, a man stabbed Rushdie after rushing onto the stage at an event in Chautauqua, New York. This interview was filmed at PEN World Voices, 2007, a literary festival Rushdie, with translator Esther Allen, and former PEN executive director, Michael Roberts founded as a response to the bevy of lies and censorship veiled under the Orwellian "the war on terror" after the 9/11 attacks that led to the American war in Iraq.