[3][4] In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government,[5] and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991.

Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao).

After both men take refuge with an elderly English Argentine woman, Chamcha is arrested and is subjected to police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant.

Chamcha's devil-like appearance intensifies until he recognizes his anger at Farishta for not defending him from arrest and abandoning him after the plane crash, after which he is transformed back into his human shape.

Chamcha wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their joint fall from the hijacked plane and resents him for his successful return to movie stardom.

Jumpy, Pamela, and Chamcha attend a rally in defense of Dr. Uhuru Simba, a controversial Black activist seemingly framed for a series of gruesome serial killings.

Simba dies suspiciously in police custody, and Sikh youth on community patrol catch the real murderer, a white man.

At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation requiring the adoption of three of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil.

One of the prophet's companions escapes to Jahilia and claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger", has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him, seemingly disproving Mahound's divine revelation.

The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they simply drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.

A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting, an allusion to Ruhollah Khomeini in his exile in Paris.

"[11] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain: embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes.

Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion.

According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on The Satanic Verses were listed as James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Frank Herbert, Thomas Pynchon, Mervyn Peake, Gabriel García Márquez, Jean-Luc Godard, J. G. Ballard, and William S.

The journalist and author Andy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal 'liberal' orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr. Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends.

Although the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author.

British Labour MP Keith Vaz led a march through Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".

[21] Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently since fatawa can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.

[22] Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese translator, was found by a cleaning lady, stabbed to death in his office at the University of Tsukuba on 13 July 1991.

Ten days prior to Igarashi's killing, Rushdie's Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured by an attacker at his home in Milan by being stabbed multiple times on 3 July 1991.

[23] William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, was critically injured by being shot three times in the back by an assailant on 11 October 1993 in Oslo.

The book's Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was the intended target of a mob of arsonists who set fire to the Madimak Hotel after Friday prayers on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, killing 37 people, mostly Alevi scholars, poets and musicians.

[25] In response, the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, denounced the death sentence and called it "a serious violation of free speech".