After 'Satanic Verses' controversy, Salman Rushdie's life in hiding & beyond

Indian-British author Salman Rushdie.

Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, India was forced to go underground as a bounty was put on his head.

He was granted police protection by the government in Britain, where he was at school and where he made his home, following the murder or attempted murder of his translators and publishers.

He spent nearly a decade in hiding, moving houses repeatedly and being unable to tell his children where he lived. Rushdie only began to emerge from his life on the run in the late 1990s after Iran in 1998 said it would not support his assassination.

He became a fixture on the international party circuit, even appearing in films such as "Bridget Jones's Diary" and US television sitcom "Seinfeld". He has been married four times and has two children.

Born in Mumbai, Rushdie attended the English boarding school Rugby before studying history at the University of Cambridge.

He initially turned to advertising, coining slogans such as "naughty but nice" for cream cakes, which entered common parlance. While Rushdie has become an avid social media user in recent years, the author had said he is glad that the fatwa controversy occurred in a pre-digital age.

"There was essentially no email, no text messages, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Web, and that of course slowed down the attack," he said in 2012.

As an advocate of freedom of speech, he notably launched a strong defence of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo after its staff were gunned down by Islamists in Paris in 2015.

The magazine had published drawings of Mohammed that drew furious reactions from Muslims worldwide. "I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity," Rushdie had said. 

Threats and boycotts have continued against literary events that Rushdie attends, and his knighthood in 2007 sparked protests in Iran and Pakistan, where a government minister said the honour justified suicide bombings.

Rushdie wrote a memoir "Joseph Anton", named after his alias while in hiding and written in the third person.

It is one of several works of non-fiction and more than a dozen novels that Rushdie has written, along with several short stories, many of them addressing issues of migration and post-colonialism.

Still prolific, his latest novel "Quichotte" was published in 2019.

"Midnight's Children", which runs to more than 600 pages, has been adapted for the stage and silver screen, and his books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
 

Rushdie became a US citizen in 2016. He now lives in New York and his novel published in 2015 -- "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" -- is set in the city.  

On Friday, Rushdie, 75, was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York's Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist, who has lived with a bounty on his head since the late 1980s.

In September 1995, after six years under police protection and living in safe houses, Rushdie appeared in London in his first pre-announced public appearance since the fatwa was issued.

Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami had said the Rushdie affair is "completely finished".

In September 1998, former Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi told ex-British foreign secretary Robin Cook at the United Nations in New York that Iran will take no action to threaten Rushdie's life, nor encourage anybody else to do so.

After hours of surgery, Rushdie was on a ventilator and unable to speak on Friday evening after an attack condemned by writers and politicians around the world as an assault on the freedom of expression.

Rushdie was being introduced to give a talk to an audience of hundreds on artistic freedom at western New York's Chautauqua Institution when a man rushed to the stage and lunged at the novelist.

Stunned attendees helped wrest the man from Rushdie, who had fallen to the floor.

A New York State Police trooper providing security at the event arrested the attacker. Police identified the suspect as Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old man from Fairview, New Jersey, who bought a pass to the event.