The Independent – Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion

In the 17 years since Ayatollah Khomeini passed a death sentence on Salman Rushdie, the writer’s unflinching criticism of the religion into which he was born has never been stifled. Now, as the force of Islamist fury reverberates around the world, the acclaimed Anglo-Asian novelist tells Johann Hari why we’re all living under a fatwa now

Un’altra citazione dall’articolo con un tema di cui si occupa Rushdie, in linea con quanto dice Amartya Sen nel suo Identità e violenza, che stiamo leggendo.

The mass uprooting he celebrated helped to create the Islamist pining for a fictitious lost purity that is trying to kill him, a desperate quest to recreate the Mecca of Mohammed in the world’s cold concrete jungles: “I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the consequences of migration. Now I’m being forced to see that there’s a nightmare as well as a dream.”

Rushdie sees his career as falling into three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands – India and Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the journey across water to the West. “And now I think that the third act is to say, ‘All right, all that happened,’” he explains. “The world has become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we live in its aftermath – now what?”