Word: faithfully
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What exactly did Rushdie do to merit such a threat? By Western standards, nothing -- at least nothing that could not be punished with a bad review. But among Muslims, and not just fundamentalists and extremists, there was an almost universal judgment that he had dishonored the faith (see box). Every Muslim critic seemed to have a favorite offending passage from his book. But, in sum, they felt he had insulted the faith, ridiculed the Prophet, trivialized the sacred -- and that the sin was compounded because it was committed by a born, though not a practicing, Muslim...
...intellectuals, all non-Muslims, declared in a joint statement, "The pain of scurrilous intrusion into the regions of the sacred is not felt by the so-called fundamentalists only, but is the common experience of the whole, besieged ((Muslim)) minority. While there can be rational opposition to their faith, there should be no outraging of it by obscenity and slander...
Rushdie possesses an egotistical, self-righteous streak that has not always endeared him to his fellow Britons. He has been an articulate critic of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's economic policies. And somewhere in the process of becoming Westernized, Rushdie lost his faith. "When I was young, I was religious in quite an unthinking way," he said recently. "Now I'm not, but I am conscious of a space where...
COVER: Hunted by an angry faith, novelist Salman Rushdie is at the epicenter of a storm between East and West...
...Rushdie's most bitterly disputed passages deals with the famous Satanic verses from which the novel takes its title. Here Mahound is tempted by Gibreel (obviously a reference to the angel Gabriel) to cut a deal with the enemies of his embryonic faith and tolerate worship of three of their goddesses alongside the one God. Gibreel later tells Mahound that the idea came from Satan, and the prophet orders acceptance of the rival deities to be stricken from his holy text...