CHICAGO (Islam Online) - British author Salman Rushdie, who enraged Muslims more than a decade ago with his book, "The Satanic Verses," is on the move again. The controversial and infamous writer is planning to leave Britain and live permanently in the United States, according to his friends.
Friends say Rushdie, 53, originally from India, is buying an apartment in New York. "Mr. Rushdie has become increasingly disillusioned with Britain and feels very much at home with that Vanity Fair and New Yorker crowd,'' one London-based paper quoted a friend of Rushdie as saying.
In an earlier interview to the Daily Telegraph, Rushdie was asked as to why he gave up the idea of writing a book on his years in exile and he replied, "I don't want a fatwa around my neck again."
The move would mean British taxpayers would be relieved of the annual one-million-pound ($1.6 million) bill for his police protection. Rushdie has had round-the-clock protection and lived in a series of safe houses in Britain ever since a fatwa was made against Rushdie for what he wrote in the controversial book. The fatwa (or religious decree) condemning Rushdie to death was issued by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 for blasphemy against Islam. One private Iranian group has offered $2.8 million to whomever kills Rushdie.
Meanwhile, a conservative Iranian cleric said Friday that a death sentence on the British writer could never be quashed, and expressed the hope that it would be carried out. "No one has the authority to annul this unalterable and divine verdict which will be, God willing, implemented," Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi said at the last Friday prayers in Tehran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said recently that the death sentence declared because of Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" remained in force and there was no question of withdrawing it. He said London had agreed to press ahead with the normalization of relations with Tehran without insisting on a formal lifting of the death sentence.
After a meeting with Kharazi in New York in late 1998, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said he had won an undertaking from Tehran that it would not seek to implement the fatwa against the writer.
Kharazi said the statements of conservatives were "not representative of the Iranian government," echoing comments he made in 1998 distancing Tehran from a $2.8 million- bounty placed on Rushdie's head by a conservative religious foundation here, Khordad-15.
