These include family, friends, several fellow writers and public figures, the anti-censorship organization “Article 19,” the police officers who guarded him and ordinary decent folk. Rushdie, who moved to Britain from his native India at the age of 13, expresses profound gratitude to those Britons who stood by him throughout his ordeal. “t was a name that could not be spoken, like the name Voldemort in the then-unwritten Harry Potter books.” “His own name was worse than useless,” he recalls.

(Rushdie may like the writers, but he did not want to become someone else he refers to himself in the third person apparently to emphasize his discomfort with his new moniker.) “Joseph Anton” became the name Rushdie used for everything but writing during the decade he spent in hiding and under police protection. Joseph Anton derives its title from the names of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, two of Rushdie’s favorite writers. “Polls taken after the ‘Rushdie Affair’ began,” writes Rushdie in his new memoir Joseph Anton, in which he refers to himself in the third person, “showed that a large majority of the British public felt he should apologize for his ‘offensive’ book.” That work incited Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder and supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to issue a 1989 fatwa, or legal ruling, calling on faithful Muslims to murder the author for blasphemy. Such a remark, even if made jokingly, exemplifies the hostility Rushdie endured from many fellow Britons following the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses. At one point in the British film My Son the Fanatic, scripted by Hanif Kureishi and based on his short story, a white comedian performing in the 1990s in a club in the northern English town of Bradford begins referring to the sole non-white member of the audience (played by Indian actor Om Puri) as “Salman Rushdie.”īetween crude as well as racist taunts, the comic makes a terrifying statement regarding his hapless and unwilling Rushdie dummy: “If there’s any of Rafsanjani’s mates in here, slip me a tenner and I’ll shoot the bastard for ya.”

Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie