Thursday, April 17, 2014

Martin Amis describes arguing with Prince Charles over Rushdie fatwa

Author recalls dinner party contretemps with Charles over death threats to Satanic Verses author

Martin Amis composite
Fatwa row … Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Prince Charles. Composite: Murdo Macleod/Reuters
Alison Flood

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.

According to Amis, Prince Charles "said – very typically, it seems to me – 'I'm sorry, but if someone insults someone else's deepest convictions, well then,' blah blah blah" said the novelist. "And I said that a novel doesn't set out to insult anyone. 'It sets out to give pleasure to its readers,' I told him. 'A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel."
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