QuoteThis week, it emerged that the Prince of Wales refused to support Salman Rushdie when his novel, The Satanic Verses, was condemned by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who ordered a fatwa on the author and offered a fee of $1 million to anyone who would assassinate him.
Prince Charles thought the book was offensive to Muslims, and was at a private dinner where he told the novelist Martin Amis: 'I'm sorry, but if someone insults someone else's deepest convictions, well then...'
Martin stoutly defended his friend Rushdie, saying: 'A novel doesn't set out to insult anyone. It sets out to give pleasure to its readers.'
I'm sorry, Martin, but Salman Rushdie did set out to offend Muslim feeling. Of course the Prince of Wales was right not to support him during the crisis.
More: A N WILSON: Rushdie's vanity and why Prince Charles was RIGHT not to support him during the fatwa | Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2605509/A-N-WILSON-Rushdies-vanity-Prince-Charles-RIGHT-not-support-fatwa.html)
QuoteMartin Amis Describes Arguing with Prince Charles Over Rushdie Fatwa
Martin Amis "had an argument" with Prince Charles over his refusal to support Salman Rushdie after a fatwa was issued against him, the author has said.
Amis told Vanity Fair he argued with Charles "at a small dinner party" following the worldwide storm that ensued after publication of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses in 1989.
Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against Rushdie, who was accused of "insulting" Islam in the novel, saying that every Muslim must "employ everything he has got" to kill him.
Copies of the book were burned around the world, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher was shot, his Japanese editor murdered and his Italian translator stabbed, with many people dying in riots protesting the novel's publication.
More: Martin Amis describes arguing with Prince Charles over Rushdie fatwa | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/15/martin-amis-arguing-prince-charles-rushdie-fatwa)
Cindy
Prince Charles clearly did not read that train wreck of a book, it has to be the most idiotic and worst written book ever, certainly among the top ten, nothing to do with the fatwa it was simply poorly written, but the fact that nothing pertaining to said religion can be said by anyone without fearing extremists is not to be applauded by Charles or anyone else. The book had one sentence at the beginning on the first or second chapter that was found offensive by extremists it was not a book about offending anyone, it was fiction and this was idiotic of Charles... sadly I read it all expecting there to be something more than that sentence since a man's death was asked for, but nope, and I will never get back the hours reading about the lives of the cardboard characters in that book... :orchid:
I never read the book ... I wasn't much interested, so I don't know if it insulted anyone's religion or not, but I remember the orders from the Ayatollah, to kill Rushdie, because they thought it was a deliberate insult.
Cindy
I read it :orchid: crappy, to me, and it did not read as a deliberate insult. And, it was nothing to kill anyone over, IMO... :shrug:
Well, it's ridiculous to kill someone over something they said in a book, be it a deliberate slur or not, be it religious or not. Around the same time as "The Satanic Verses" was published, "The Last Temptation of Christ" was made into a movie. I'd read the book years earlier and didn't feel Christ was insulted, and I didn't feel the movie was insulting, either. But many people refused to even see it, and I was told by my mother that it was banned where she lived. I guess to some people, religion means enough in their life that they take umbrage where no offense was ever intended.
Cindy