this is due to be news live from berlin coming up next it's been over 30 years and surrounds mallos declared a fatwah on the rise or salma rush the our show doc film looks at his life in the shadow of death under that spotlight that's all for me bryan thomas for the entire news team thanks for being with us and agree we can. in a mission to save the. marvel comics started in 1039 they created a vast empire of superheroes with human weaknesses. could have had their share of closures in a moving story. starts march t.w. . that that not the

level of padding. that not that of that i listed it was that i add. that. for more than 10 years salmond rushdie was a hunted man living in hiding with a false identity and under police protection. the front walk calling for his execution was issued in 1989 following the publication of his book the satanic verses which was considered blasphemous. with the threat of death hanging over him rushdie changed his address 56 times during those 10 years and was the target of some 20 assassination attempts.

but that's all behind him now rushdie has left england and settled in new york where he has lived for almost 20 years. 'd i was born in what was then called bombay india in june 1970 that's to say exactly age weeks to the day before the end of the british empire. my father used to tell this joke which i think he told slate. me too many times about how i was born in 8 weeks later the british run away it's

a woodward would be for the people to sit with the lord she would. i remember my childhood as being very happy. i came from a nonobservant muslim family you know but religions really weren't a big issue you know and nor was nationality so in the little neighborhood where we lived there were i would my childhood friends were of every possible religion you know they were hindu muslim sikh christian. and all that seemed completely normal. and that sense of it of everybody else is the culture being available to us it was one of the great things about growing up that. like many children i was told many times stories by my parents my father would tell us. i mean the east indian

equivalent of fairy tales of the arabian nights stories you know and it actually when you read the 1001 nights you realize that it's not at all a children's book it's full of sex but of course my father gave me his version is adaptations of them which interested me in to read when i grew up to read the real thing and that was influential too but i never had any idea of what to do with my life except being a writer so when even when i was a child. my parents often has told me that when their friends asked them asked me what do you want to do when you grow up i would not say that i want to be a. you know airline pilots are of astronauts i would say i want to rewrite it this is when i was like i don't know 910 years old you know so it was always the plan i never really had a plan b. . and i did start rising

little things my memory of the 1st story i ever wrote is that i went to see the movie the wizard of oz. and i came home and wrote a story called over the rainbow is a story about a boy like myself in a city like bombay and he meets magical creatures and anyway personally wasn't long it was a few pages long and my father said that he would have his secretary type it up so you know he did and then he said you know if i give this to you you're going to lose it so i will look after it so he took it away and then he lost it but my parents they still thought that an english education in europe in england was the best thing they could offer me but nobody forced me you know i mean that's to say my father said to me would i be interested to go but if i said no then i didn't have to go so they left the decision to me my mother was completely against the

idea she didn't want me to go. but she also left the decision to me and and. the strange thing is that i was very happy as i said growing up in bombay you know i i liked the world of my childhood i liked my school you know i had plenty of friends and it's very hard not to understand about that young boy who was what 1212 and a half years old when this question was asked you know. why did he say yes he wanted to go you know and it seems mysterious to me that i made that decision and it suggests that there was i don't know some spirit of adventure some desire to go away and see other things. and maybe it was in part inspired by reading but if i could i'd read all these english children's books you know and so i had a picture of england in my mind which of course was completely inaccurate england

is not like a children's book. who. when i arrived well 1st of all it was very cold but i arrived in winter in january and i boy from the tropics so so just the physical fact of how cold it was it was difficult and then i discovered more disappointing things about england which was to put it in a simple word racism you know that. it was the 1st time in my life that i had had the feeling or been given the feeling of being the other of being the person who was not like the people who were there and and and disliked for that reason. boys find all sorts of ways of being nasty to other boys that's true but the way they found being oste to me was to attack me for my racial origins you know and

that was i mean that was very shocking it was very shocking. i didn't speak english with an english accent and and yes i mean my skin is color is relatively light and so it means that over the years i in many ways suffered less racial prejudice than other people with my background you know. but it was all around you know in the that period of after i graduated i graduated in 1988 and you know the the seventy's and eighty's in england were a time of quite considerable racial tension. but i had a very bad start as a writer you know when i left university because i decided to settle in england and

not go back east i think that i was very confused about my identity as a writer but what kind of writer i was who exactly i was as a rising and and so a lot of the things that i wrote to begin with. we were floored because of that they were they were. they were very good. as working as a rising copywriter to pay the rent and then i was writing these various other projects probably 3 book length manuscripts that that i wrote in that in that time that were never published. and i mean actually now i'm very grateful they were published. because they were written into a very good. so there was a lot of work and failure. i published one novel that essentially nobody liked and there were various other abandoned projects that i really felt that i was i hadn't found my ways and i think the question in the end was that i had to do

much more introspection i had to really understand who i was and where the writing was coming from. and out of that came a desire to reclaim. what i feared might be lost territory which was which was the world i'd come forms of the world of bombay and india you know and and so i went back there with my small savings. and i just decided i'm going to stay here as long as i can and i'm going to travel as widely as i can i'm going to just try and. you know drink this in again and i was there for an hour almost not quite not quite 6 months or 5 and a half months something like that. and by the time i came back i had a much clearer idea of what i wanted to do and i was at that came in my children. what the book is about is about my generation which is the generation of of freedom the generation of independence you know that the 1st generation to be born in india

not under colonial rule you know for over 200 years. the british left on august the midnight of august 14th the 15th yes that's what i want to write about. and so by the time i came around to writing midnight's children i i really thought this is a kind of lost child as you know that if if if i couldn't if i can't make this work that maybe i should stop but fortunately that's not what happened. it did change my life the success of midnight's children it was completely unexpected so i left university in 1988 and by the time midnight's children was published in 1901. the idea that it would become this got a global phenomenon but selling multiple millions of copies and translated into you know 50 languages and so on i would it would never have crossed my mind that that would have raised over the last it.

for the. kids that they know when a brilliant book which tells them obviously from the novel for them. so it was a complete shock. yes then you know what it did was allow me to live by my writing . and then i was what i was 34 years old at the time. rushdie spent 5 years writing the satanic verses at the time no one could foresee the rise of islamic fundamentalism but the backlash that followed the book's release was the harbinger of what was to become the dominant issue of the 21st century the spread of fanatical islamic. before the satanic verses was published rushdie asked a few friends to read the proofs his publisher said that rushdie had no idea the

storm of the satanic verses was about to unleash. the figures i didn't show it to them in the book the number of people who knew who knew the world is writing about and it was quite obvious that people of conservative religious views would not like the book with their they haven't liked anything else i wrote either so that's not particularly different but i felt that in many ways it was my most formally ambitious. book you know it was a book where i was pushing things father that i pushed in before and i. i like that about it. the book tells of 2 passengers on a flight to london brill and saladin fall victim to a terrorist attack. as their plane explodes and they fall from the sky the 2 protagonists are transformed into archangels of good and evil the book denounces the oppression of women intolerance and violence and questions the core tenants of

the islamic faith in one seen prostitutes working in a brothel take the names of the wives of the prophet in order to boost their earnings and in a thinly veiled reference to ayatollah khomeini the novel also depicts an exile the mom who during the revolution returns to his home country and tyrannizes the people i knew about the rise of islamic fundamentalism in fact there's a character in the satanic verses who is who is you know who is of that kind was a fundamentalist preacher. i think you know anyone who comes from the east who had paid attention to what was happening in the world we knew about that. and. the only reason now a lot of people who read the book say that it seems to have foreseen what was going to happen but it wasn't for seeing it it was just paid attention to what was actually happening which at that time people in the west were not paying attention i use this metaphor of hitchcock's film the birds. because there's this scene in

the birds where there are children singing in a classroom and outside the classroom there's the playground but there's a there's a climbing frame jungle gym and the film cuts back and forth between the 2 and 1st time it looks outside the window you see one black would come to sit on the frame and then you go back in the children singing and then you go back out and there's like 500 and and the point is that when there's just one bird sitting there doesn't mean anything it's just a bird sitting on a climbing frame it's only retrospectively when there are 500 goods but you begin to think oh yeah there was that 1st mud. but i think what happened in the case of what happened to the satanic verses is it's it was something like the 1st started. in september 988 the publication of the satanic verses caused an instant uproar in the muslim community it criticized what they saw as rushdie's irreverent portrayal

of the prophet the book triggered a wave of protests across the arab world. i mean attacks like this against books had taken place before they were against other writers of the muslim world najib mahfouz for example the nobel laureate. well i think what happened in the west is that people were completely taken by surprise. there was some argument about the book you know there was some in england with particular there were some muslim priests who spoke up against it and that's more or less what would have happened had it not been the intervention of police. book came out in september largely radiate in the photos 6 months later for everybody not. on february 14th 1909 in toronto the spiritual leader of the islamic revolution ayatollah khomeini issued

a religious decree or fatwa ordering all muslims to kill the british indian writer salman rushdie and his publishers for the books blasphemous attacks on islam the prophet and the koran a bounty of $25000.00 was offered to any iranian who carried out the sentence and $7500.00 to any muslim of another nationality he said in the name of god almighty i call on all zealous muslims to execute them quickly wherever they may find them so that no one else will dare insult islamic sanctities. but i was at home in london. and the telephone rang and it was a woman from the b.b.c. from the news radio news program. who i think what she said is how does it feel to know that you have been sentenced to death by the ayatollah khomeini. it's the 1st

i've heard of it and the and i said something stupid like it doesn't feel very good and and put the phone down and then i did something even more stupid which is to run around the house locking the doors and windows as if that that it would be fired. my 1st thought was i think i think i'm a dead man i think i began to think that and then my days might be numbered in less than double figures. at the time nobody understood exactly what it might mean i had to go to a television interview 1st c.b.s. television in america and i was asking the journalists at the c.b.s. office in london what do you think this means. and one of them said oh don't worry about it you know khamenei he said this is the president of the united states to death every friday you know so. so nobody knew whether to take it seriously or not . but i did and i think within 24 hours the british had also decided

that the take this seriously and and that's when the protection was offered the night except. his literary agent andrew wylie remembers rusty's call miley said i had to ask him what a fatwa was i had never heard the word before he said he was going into hiding right away. but. over the next few weeks demonstrations against rushdie escalated across britain muslim communities help book burnings thousands of protestors who considered the book evil and insulting to islam demanded that it be banned. in london activists burned effigies of the author while chanting allah is great and death to rushdie. a professor of islamic. studies spoke out against rushdie in an

open letter to the international herald tribune your western readers are unable to gauge the acuteness of the blow you have dealt us he wrote what do you think the response of black americans would be if you were to mock martin luther king jr or the reaction of the jewish community if you you know giant hit the. field you saw the director of the islamic center and his librarian were murdered tonight on the premises of the mosque of brussels. had apparently taken a moderate stance in the rushdie affair. is the director of the islamic center. was found dead with gunshot wounds to the head and the neck. of the head was killed in a similar fashion he was head of the islamic center library he said. the t.v. is full of blood lust i'm not of the hotel and he will i mean this on

a mobile place. there is weaponry everywhere the moment when things really changed for me was when i saw television coverage of the burning of the civil lawsuit but i thought of it them i think of it as one of the most obscene images like ever witnessed when khamenei intervened that the narrative a changed that the i say what i thought of how up to that point when an argument. turned into something much more dangerous. britain's biggest bookseller withdrew the satanic verses from its 430 stores on the same day the writer stephen king called the head of the chain and gave him an ultimatum if you don't sell the satanic verses you don't sell stephen king the book was back on the shelves the next day. there were some political problems which is that the thatcher government in england was aware of the fact that i had

been a strong critic of the thoughts of government and so they weren't particularly in love with me but on the other hand they offered the police protection and maintained it. today a protest took place in paris with banners reading kill rushdie and it. caused death to rushdie and other bar or god is great were chanted between the bow to them plus the laughter public metro stations by about a 1000 demonstrators i mean you know many fist don't you for them rushdie's book was a stab in the back. but not all politicians and intellectuals supported rushdie john mccrea wrote in the guardian that nobody has a god given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity. the beloved children's author rod dollar leveled the harshest attack this kind of sensationalism does indeed get an indifferent book on the top of the bestseller list he seems to be regarded as some

sort of a hero to my mind he's a dangerous opportunist. even jimmy carter whose presidency was destroyed by ayatollah khomeini denounced the book calling it an insult to the sacred beliefs of our muslim friends and the singer cat stevens who converted to islam in 1977 expressed disapproval of rushdie's writings and support for the death sentence another critic prince charles said i'm sorry but if someone insults someone else's deepest convictions well then you shouldn't pretend to be surprised a few years later his mother queen elizabeth the 2nd knighted rushdie for his service to literature effigies of the queen and the author were burned at several demonstrations. on june 3rd 1909 ayatollah khomeini died in tehran leaving the fatwa in place. his successor i have told us how many declared it is incumbent on every muslim to employ everything he has to

send salman rushdie to hell even if it means sacrificing his life. the death sentence against solomon pronounced a year ago by ayatollah khomeini has been reaffirmed by his successor ayatollah ali hama now a iran's religious leader referred to the british writer mr rushdie as the author of the blasphemous book the satanic verses for the islamic fanatics continue to pursue salman rushdie the author of the satanic verses condemned to death by khomeini he's in hiding somewhere in england protected by scotland yard as translators have also become targets the 1st attack took place earlier in the week in italy and a 2nd one has now heard in japan. itoshi ghosh if you toshiko rushing in expert islamic professor at the university of dead this morning in front of an elevator near his office that he had been stabbed several times literary agent has already been attacked by a pakistani militant in february 1990 s.

at a press conference marking the book's release in tokyo. rushdie went to new york in december 1991 to give a speech at columbia university it was his 1st trip outside britain he had to take a royal air force plane because british airways refused to let him fly with them citing security reasons the windows of his new york city hotel room were bulletproofed. it isn't. so much. you know tobar 992 the writer launched an international campaign to have the death sentence against him removed i decided to make a lot of noise he said because noise is my only hope rushdie came to paris in march 1903 for the 1st time since the fatwa had been declared on 3 previous occasions the french authorities had refused his request to enter the country. let's look at our country is the country of artists writers and freedom and i wanted someone rushed

to give be here at the earliest possible opportunity so we can express our friendship our admiration and our support clients you know to let me assure. you this year but let's look at some of what i like in france was there was great support across the political spectrum and i was in france several times in those years and met everyone from jacques non to 2 to buy into you know everyone you could think of sheer luck etc the only person that would not meet me was was me to all. just refused and of course you know how close we were and. repeatedly tried to persuade him that he needed to come aboard but for whatever reason he would not so i never met me through all the mush if i was. out.

i was. in july 993 islamic radicals set fire to a hotel and see this turkey where the translator of the satanic verses was among those attending a cultural conference 37 people died in the blaze it was the last large scale protest as the years passed the death threats became fewer. gradually rushdie began to appear in public again bookstores ushered him in through the back door 994 in january a group of 100 arab and muslim intellectuals published statements in favor of rushdie excerpts of the satanic verses banned in all muslim countries appeared in an egyptian newspaper on october 14th the nobel prize winning novelist. was seriously wounded in a knife attack in cairo. but gradually things

improved in the sense that the. analysis of the threats against my life begun to diminish and eventually there was an agreement between the british and the iranian governments which essentially ended the threat good afternoon i'm delighted to say it is x. and say dr haraszti as clarified there in government's position on this and on the bounty on the life of the author of the satanic verses the government of the stomach for because we don't has no intention nor is it going to take any action whatsoever to have threatened the life of the author of this authentic verses. or anybody else to share that beat these it is of course no repeat in korea or a cease in the body to doso. gradually the security measures put in place to protect rushdie more relaxed he was able to live more freely british airways announced that he was once again welcome on board its flights but despite iran's

decision to drop the fatwa many hardliners continue to upload it. i want to have a dialogue reviewed by a martian gun you know. themes here they go guy walking or running today hey. we'll kill you the way them i may need to break the law. but. i doubt that. that was. that a lot i see that not a lot of that i see. that i see them or that. they see not you i sort of coming to america i would come here. for 2 or 3 months a year and here it seemed possible to live relatively normal life without any of those and this is for some innocent america you know as an american before 911.

it felt fine felt safe. and i'm often asked the question about whether i regretted writing the satanic verses but i mean i regretted what happened to me as a consequence of it you know i would much rather that had not happened but as far as the book is concerned you know i'm more and more proud of it. i mean this year it will be 30 years since the satanic verses was published and and i also think that what's happening now as the as the scandal goes away is that people are able to read it as a book rather than as some kind of standard as text. one of the effects of the rise

of radical islam has been to not so much to frighten writers as to frighten publishers you know i think i think there's a lot of books that would not get themselves published now because people are scared to publish them one of the great surprises of my life has been the return of religion to the center of the stage you know that i mean i'm an old source on tweeter you know and in those days we argued about many things but we didn't discuss religion and religion seem to be. an irrelevance politically and since then it has become of the seat centric in a way in a way that none of us suspected. in the setting of western europe and america where there is a lot of prejudice against muslim people it is obviously wrong that people should

be discriminated against their religion and they need to be protected. but it's equally wrong to protect the religion from all criticism. criticism of islam has become equated with an attack on muslim people. and and so even people on the liberal end of the progressive leftist end of the spectrum now find problematic the idea of supporting people who make fun of religion of it or at least of that particular religion nobody cares if it will make fun of you know catholics or jews but but islam people seem to have. a false sense of having to protect it you know and that sometimes leads to terrible mistakes like the failure of a number of american writers to support for example. on january 7th

2015 gunmen stormed the offices of the french satirical newspaper. during a weekly editorial meeting 12 people including 8 journalists and 2 police officers were murdered in the islamist terrorist attack the famous cartoonists couple shop on their way to new and well in ski were among the victims in february 2006 they had published a series of caricature us of the prophet mohammed the killers said you will pay for insulting the prophet before killing the journalists i think people are in a kind of state of denial and they don't really understand how difficult is going to be that's a sadness of our time i mean i remember here in new york after after the 911 attacks. a couple of journalist friends of mine i mean very senior journalists with experienced you know us saying to me oh now we understand what happened here and i thought really thought you know what thousands of people have to die before you

understand what happened to me but then i understood that that's not what he was saying exactly what he was saying was or the 2 of them were saying was that now it had also happened to them. this is the this is the the horrible. center of the whole. motor or. the but. the but he difficulties because he knows how much people in new york dislike you never feel. horrible what's happening in this country right now and i think what has been happening at the borders has been almost almost the worst thing you know so far the the imprisonment of children but one of the most awful things about this administration is that it appears to have no bottom and that you know every time you think there's no way they can get more

than this they find a place to go even lower than that. i mean it's horrifying every day the novel before it was in a 2 years 8 months 28 nights is a kind of fairy tale of new york with genies and so on and and so i thought what did i do that is really radically different from that and that's what led to the method that the matter of the golden house. the book is shaped as having the beginning of the day of the inauguration of barack obama and it ends at the time of the inauguration of the 45th president who was not referred to by name in the book there's a cartoon character who replaces trump in the novel which is which is the joker the villain from the batman. and so i thought well i don't want to have that word trump in the book so i'll have the joker instead and then it seems to me not inappropriate that a comic book will and should become president of the united states and i just

thought i'm writing a book roughly speaking about the obama years about about what was happening in america in those in that just under a decade from a moment of great optimism. to a moment of something like the opposite of that. in this novel renee a young filmmaker in search of a story spends his days spying on his new neighbor nero golden and enigma magic a millionaire from india who settles in the heart of greenwich village new york with his 3 sons these strange fascinating neighbors with their mysterious ways become an unexpected source of inspiration. i thought that he would be watching what happens and telling us. one of the films that was really just seemed like an obvious reference in this novel was for his close real window because where a lot of the novel is set is in this kind of secret garden in the middle of

greenwich village and it suddenly struck me that this would be a wonderful space for the action of the novel that it had something theatrical about it it's almost like a stage you know in which the actor the characters the novel can act out their stories on the stage and they can be watched by everybody the bigger of the garden but really his head is full of movies so he's always the view of movies the thing he does share with me is a passion for the cinema this obsession with this with with movies that i've had all my life because it becomes his obsession justice or you get away with a lot more indian movies. when i was a college the only other dream that i had was to be an actor and and then i i think probably wisely i didn't i didn't pursue that that particular career but for me it's always been like a little bit of an unscratched which sometimes of people have offered me small come

your roles in movies i've been excited to to do it you know it's fun and the actress helen hunt was directing her 1st film and in it there was a character of an indian doctor. indian guide ecologist and. out of the blue they called me and said would i like to do it so i had to play helen hunt's got a college asst the oh hello hello hello how are you i. oh. sorry so. anyone else coming you know this is it is this is it you little.

thing. just looks great. i had to learn a great deal about how to work ultrasound machines and it was like that so if you know anybody who needs an ultrasound i can do it. although the fatwa issued against rushdie was finally lifted the iranian press continued to put a price on his head the price rose 500000 dollars and 201-260-0000 in 2016. and on the eve of the sinister 30th anniversary of the fatwa some religious fanatics decided to add another $300000.00 to the $3000000.00 offered 15 years ago by ayatollah haasan son i. while the muslim uproar over the satanic verses continued larry david who produced h.b.o.'s comedy series curb your enthusiasm asked rushdie if he was willing to draw

a line under the fatwa and that period by doing a sketch about it. when they 1st approached me to ask me to do it my 1st reaction was i'm not sure that this is funny is you know is this really funny and then i thought about it and i thought well actually there would have been a point in my life when it really wasn't funny at all you know but even if we've now reached the point at which it can be comedy you know which we can make jokes about it then actually that's a very good point to have reached you know and so then so i said yes i'm happy to do it because it is from. mr david is here now saying the list today coming. you know you've survived many many years and well it's you know it's there yeah but . that philosophy yeah could be scary could be bewildering cetera but there are things that you gain a lot of women who are attracted to you in this condition. and if it was any

condition that they did you are a dangerous man. there are very beautiful women the fatwa wrapped around you by kind of sexy pixie dust ha but while sex is beginning to circle around you but that is not the only benefit for example you don't have to go to anything you don't want to go to so that your cousin is giving a reading of his lousy poetry book. when you say sorry. fatwa somebody calls and says can you come pick me up at the airport you say. this musical about me yes so. i don't think there really will be a musical. the musical was aired just once on h.b.o. following an episode of david's show featuring rushdie.

said it was just the. god knows that. he's going.

to. go. through. the. current. clothes are lifestyle choices and fashion statements but they also waste water and pollute the environment be killed for good and this is designers who are lazing new patents with garments made from plastic and paper and lays down the snow tomorrow. eco friendly africa. 90 minutes w. . i was issued when i arrived here i slept with people in

a room. it was hard. i even got white hair. that chip my language head nodding off the face gives me a little push maybe took in truck loads of say you want to know their story. spurred fighting and reliable information for margaret. is the shaman race destroying itself. we are ruining the basic elements of our system that we're using too much water and were colluding the water is life plain. want to go lower supplies will last for ever but they won't play when the rain stops starts march 20th on t.w. .

place . this is the news coming to you live from bud. for millions of civilians trapped in syria's restive. russian. province a tense calm has been reported government offensive displaced almost a 1000000 people over the last 3 months. also on the program thousands of refugees after greek turkish border according to enter the european union they are running out of options after deplores special forces to prevent greek police from.