Salman Rushdie's Death Sentence

The New Yorker has published an extract from the author's forthcoming memoir, about his years in hiding following Khomeini's fatwa. As with much of what Rushdie does, it's very clever, and written using an interesting third-person narrative structure. For such a grave topic, one wouldn't expect wit to shine through, but Rushdie's capacity for humour is evident throughout:

He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair. One foreign correspondent came over to him to be friendly. He asked this man what he should make of Khomeini’s pronouncement. Was it just a rhetorical flourish, or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the President of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”

Incidentally, the reward for his assassination has been raised in the wake of the recent backlash over the amateurish video we're all supposed to be talking about now. There's no comparison, really, since Rushdie's novel was and is a work of art, but it's interesting to see how so comparatively few people have taken a "well, it was stupid of you to make something offensive to Islam" approach in responding to the latest global crisis of religious indignation; it's amazing, looking at the Rushdie case, to see how many people said just that.