Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...unprecedented international furor surrounding the fictional novel The Satanic Verses still rages, more than a week after Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini first called for the death of its British author Salman Rushdie, promising Paradise to his murderer. This controversy has put to test some of our most valued beliefs, including the sanctity of human life and of our rights to free speech...
Resentment toward the novel and its Bombay-born writer has been building among Muslims for several months, and at least 15 persons have died in violent riots in India and Pakistan, where the book has been banned since its publication several months ago. Many Muslims believe that it defames both the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed and that it portrays the twelve wives of the Prophet as prostitutes...
...period authenticities and relentlessly violent plot practically guarantee Billy Bathgate a sale to the movies. Good luck to all concerned, for the novel's greatest strength resides in its least cinematic feature. Billy's language -- breathy, breakneck, massing phrases into great cumulus sentences that rumble with coming rough weather -- is totally unlike the short, syncopated rhythms of Ragtime. At first, readers may wonder how this young, confessed truant has run across terms like "dissynchronously" or where he picked up the poetic skills to describe a waterfall: "At the very bottom there hovered a perpetually shimmering rainbow as if not water...
Though Rushdie denies that his convoluted novel is meant to be antireligious, its profane and satirical treatment of Islam's origins is guaranteed to offend any true Muslim. Rushdie points out that his work is fictional and the two most offensive chapters merely recount the demented dreams of one of its characters. But in the eyes of believers, both historical and religious truth have come under an unprecedented assault. Their reaction is especially harsh because Rushdie was raised a Muslim. Says Professor Georges Sabagh, director of the center for Near Eastern studies at UCLA: "He's engaged in the worst...
...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...