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Under the threat of a fatwa for 33 years, the British writer Salman Rushdie was forced to live in hiding and under police protection.
Salman Rushdie’s nightmare began with the publication of his book The Satanic Verses in 1988. For Ayatollah Khomeini, this novel is an offense to Islam. The supreme guide then proclaims a fatwa, a religious decree against the writer, inviting Muslims to assassinate him. The life of the British author of Muslim origin then became hell. In Pakistan, India and Iran, demonstrators shout their hatred. So begins a life of hiding for him, moving from cache to cache under police protection.
At a press conference in 1992 in London (United Kingdom), the most threatened writer in the world had a touch of humor: “Others have the same problem. Madonna has more fanatics than me”, he said. Since 2008, he no longer lived in hiding, although the fatwa has not yet been lifted. In recent years, the author has been living in the United States, without police protection.