Salman’s a Sir, but Pakistan don’t like it
From The Guardian:
Pakistani MPs today demanded that Britain withdraw the knighthood bestowed on author Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses caused outrage around the world for allegedly insulting Islam.
A government-backed resolution condemning the author’s knighthood was passed unanimously by the lower house of the Pakistani parliament amid angry protests across the country.
Iran accused Britain yesterday of insulting Islam by awarding a knighthood to Salman Rushdie, whose novel The Satanic Verses prompted the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his assassination.
Mohammad Ali Hosseini, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, portrayed the decision to honour the novelist as an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies, describing Rushdie as “one of the most hated figures” in the Islamic world.
Aside from the self-evident notion of death sentences against authors being a bad thing, this continuing outrage against The Satanic Verses seems just a little out of date. Fury, the 2001 Rushdie novel that “exhausts all negative superlatives,” according to critic James Wood – that’s the one to get angry at.
