'It would be absurd to think that books can cause riots,' Rushdie told an Indian journalist shortly before the publication of The Satanic Verses. It is a measure of the strangeness of the world in which we now live that storytelling can be such a hazardous craft. Many were to be killed for translating and publishing that story. When the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Valentine's Day, 1989, for the 'blasphemies' of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was in effect sentenced to death for writing a story. And to take away not just his birthright but his life, too. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.'Įxcept that by the time Rushdie was old enough to read these stories to his own son, that was exactly what many people wanted to do. First, that 'stories were not true … but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him.' And, second, that all stories 'belonged to him … and to everyone else.' Most of all, the young Rushdie learned that 'Man was a storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was.

Rushdie learned 'two unforgettable lessons' from these tales. When he was a child, Salman Rushdie's father read to him 'the great wonder tales of the East,' from the great Arabic and Sanskrit and Persian tales of the Thousand and One Nights, the Panchatantra, the Kathasaritsagara and the Hamzanama.

Joseph anton book