I was very intrigued by Salman Rushdie and his story. His ideas are interesting, often times thought-provoking, and highly imaginative. I was shocked to hear that he was hunted down by people of a foreign country and religion to himself. I personally don’t know enough about the Islamic religion to criticize it, and I don’t believe that the people hunting Rushdie down represent the whole of the religion. However, the issue of a fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran seemed to be taking religious pride and morals to an absolute extreme. Rushdie was simply writing about real-world problems in a satirical way, and to order a terror attack that would last decades and put a man into hiding does not portray a good image of not only the people of Iran but also those who follow Islam. I think this attack of terror was not done just because of the jokes that Rushdie may have made, but instead to assert a sense of power and authority over any other people of western society that would try and attempt similar jokes. I think that the tensions of the Iraq-Iran war, and the fact that western countries (the united states) were assisting Iraq against Iran, put Iran in a very defensive and threatened state. The combination of these things may have made Rushdie’s book seem like a political statement that was against the Islamic religion.
I don’t think that Rushdie was trying to insult the Islamic religion, he was rather poking fun at it. It was a joke taken too far and it created a political complication that had Rushdie in the center of it. I cannot speak for someone else but I certainly know the actions of the attackers of Rushdie certainly do not represent the Islamic religion and the attack on the free speech of Rushdie was an adverse effect on the ideas of the religion.