Daniel Pipes is the founder of the Middle East Forum. He literally wrote the book on the Rushdie affair: The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, The Ayatollah, and the West. I pulled it down from the bookshelf and wrote him last week following the attempted assassination of Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution. He kindly agreed to answer my questions by email. In the exchange below I allude to his prescient tracking
Today Warner Bros gave its support to Ms Rowling, adding that it stands by its authors and creators who bravely express their creativity and opinions .
tell us about that and the reaction you re seeing to this attack. it was issued in 1989 just a few months before ayatollah humany died. and it was reaction to salman r rushdie s book. it was a tragedy because he died and the fatwa could never be lifted, never be resolved. the iranians negotiated ten years later with britain where rushdie was a citizen and the president of iran or former at the time said we should consider the rushdie affair completely finished. but this has been a subject of the debate between iranian reformers and hard liners ever since. and just last week the iranian media, the hard line media once again invoked that fatwa and call for rushdie s death, so the timing of the attack is very interesting. and it s being praised in
Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni was the architect of the Iranian revolution and the guiding spirit of the Iranian regime that has held sway since 1979. He was the regime s Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Ali Khameni is his successor. Salman Rushdie s novel The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988. A few months later, on February 14, 1989, Khomeni issued a fatwa proclaiming a death sentence on Rushdie and all those involved in
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Attempts to cast Said as the consummate New York intellectual miss the point that his milieu was one of global, and specifically Palestinian, anticolonial struggle.
Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
Timothy Brennan
On February 2, 1977, Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein died in his New York apartment. Hussein had been born forty-one years earlier in Musmus, a town not far from Nazareth. Politics for Hussein, Edward Said remembered, “lost its impersonality and its cruel demagogic spirit.” Hussein, Said wrote of his dear friend, “simply asked that you remember the search for real answers, and never give it up, never be seduced by mere arrangements.” Sharply critical of his own society and its rulers he had a map of the Middle East on his wall with “thought forbidden here” scrawled across it in Arabic Hussein was also a partisan of the Third World. “I am from Asia,” he pronounced in an early poem, “The l