Word: prophet
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Then, most astonishing of all, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 88, spiritual ruler of fundamentalist, revolutionary Iran, announces that the author must be killed for the sin of insulting Islam, the Prophet and the holy Koran, and for good measure exonerates any Muslim who manages to perpetrate this deed and promises him the rewards of martyrdom. And not only the author, but anyone else involved in the publication of the book. A day later, another Iranian cleric announces that a bounty has been placed on the author's head: $2.6 million if the avenger is an Iranian, $1 million...
...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...
...Britain, Rushdie had no shortage of defenders. A group of writers led by playwright Harold Pinter presented a petition in Rushdie's behalf at No. 10 Downing Street. Author Anthony Burgess, writing in the newspaper the Independent, stated the Western position precisely: "What a secular society thinks of the Prophet Muhammad is its own affair, and reason, apart from law, does not permit aggressive interference of the kind that has brought shame and death to Islamabad," where the rioting took several lives. "If Muslims want to attack the Christian or humanistic vision of Islam contained in our literature," Burgess observed...
Others, looking for parallels to the Rushdie case both inside and outside Islam, referred to Muslim resentment of the medieval Christian mystery plays, with their satanic portrayals of the Prophet as "Mahound," the name Rushdie gives his crypto-Prophet. In 1977 a fanatical band of Hanafi Muslims shot their way into three buildings in Washington, took more than 100 hostages and, among other things, tried to halt the showing of a $17 million movie epic called Muhammad, Messenger of God at theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. Though the tone of the movie was reverential, the producers...
...SATANIC VERSES by Salman Rushdie (Viking; $19.95). Charges of blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad have earned a death threat for Rushdie and international headlines for his book, an artfully written encyclopedic fiction about the explosive, often comic, meetings of East and West...