[4] His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent.

I read an astonishing amount of Golden Age science fiction, not just Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and Kurt Vonnegut but more arcane writers like Clifford D. Simak, James Blish, Zenna Henderson and L. Sprague de Camp.

"[35] Shortly after its publication, V. S. Pritchett wrote: "In Salman Rushdie, the author of Midnight's Children, India has produced a glittering novelist—one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling.

Yet at the same time there are strange Western echoes, of the irony of Sterne in Tristram Shandy—that early nonlinear writer—in Rushdie's readiness to tease by breaking off or digressing at the gravest moments.

[37] After Midnight's Children, Rushdie depicted the political turmoil in Pakistan with Shame (1983), basing his characters on Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

[16] In 1990, Rushdie reviewed Thomas Pynchon's Vineland in The New York Times, and offered some droll musings on the author's reclusiveness: "So he wants a private life and no photographs and nobody to know his home address.

[60] He opposed the British government's introduction of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act, something he writes about in his contribution to Free Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several writers, published by Penguin in November 2005.

[62] In 2014, he taught a seminar on British Literature and served as the 2015 keynote speaker[63][64] In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence.

[65] Rushdie is a member of the advisory board of The Lunchbox Fund,[66] a non-profit organisation that provides daily meals to students of township schools in Soweto of South Africa.

On 12 May 2006, Rushdie was a guest host on The Charlie Rose Show, where he interviewed Indo-Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film Water faced violent protests.

The Next People is being made by the British film production company Working Title, the firm behind projects including Four Weddings and a Funeral and Shaun of the Dead.

The book was banned in many countries with large Muslim communities, including India, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Pakistan.

"[86] Christopher Hitchens recalled: "When the Washington Post telephoned me on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask for my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once here was something that completely committed me.

To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction.

"[88] In 1993, 100 writers and intellectuals from the Muslim world, including Adonis, Mohammed Arkoun, Mahmoud Darwish, Amin Malouf and Edward Said expressed solidarity in the collection For Rushdie.

Tahar Ben Jelloun wrote that the fatwa was "intolerable, inadmissible and has nothing to do with the tolerant Islam that I was taught" and threatened "the ability to create characters and develop them in the space and time chosen by the writer."

Rabah Belamri wrote "A society that refuses to question itself, that denies artists and thinkers the right to raise doubts, that dares not laugh at itself, has no hope of prospering."

Rushdie expressed gratitude for "anthology of blows struck in the fight against obscurantism and fanaticism" by "the most gifted, the most learned, the most important voices of the Muslim and Arab world, gathered together to subject my work and the furor surrounding it to so brilliant, so many-sided, so judicious an examination.

"[94] On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of diplomatic relations with the UK, the Iranian government, then headed by Mohammad Khatami, gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder assassination operations on Rushdie.

[97] In early 2005, Khomeini's fatwa was reaffirmed by Iran's current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Mazeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs' Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran–Iraq War.

[95] During the 2006 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's fatwa against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared to do so.

[112] The British Board of Film Classification refused to allow it a certificate; "it was felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal libel, causing a breach of the peace as opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation."

When the fatwa was issued against him by a senile theocratic dictator who had run his own country into beggary and bankruptcy and misery, every Arab and Muslim writer worthy of the name, all signed, and wrote in a book for Salman, we identify our cause with you, and your struggle with free expression in our culture.

Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.When asked about reading and writing as a human right, Rushdie states: "...there are the larger stories, the grand narratives that we live in, which are things like nation, and family, and clan, and so on.

[175] In 2006, Rushdie stated that he supported comments by Jack Straw, then-Leader of the House of Commons from Labour, who criticized the wearing of the niqab (a veil that covers all of the face except the eyes).

In the wake of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy in March 2006 Rushdie signed the manifesto Together Facing the New Totalitarianism, a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism.

Khan had called Rushdie "unbalanced", saying he has the "mindset of a small man", claiming they had "never met" and he would never "want to meet him ever", despite the two being spotted together in public numerous times.

He cited India's diversity, openness, and "richness of life experience" as his preference over Pakistan's "airlessness", resulting from a lack of personal freedom, widespread public corruption, and inter-ethnic tension.

[218][219][220] Following his split from Lakshmi, Rushdie was frequently seen with various women, including Riya Sen, journalist Aita Ighodaro, and actresses Olivia Wilde and Rosario Dawson, among others.