On September 18 of this year, we interviewed the novelist Salman Rushdie, whose memoir about living under a fatwa had just been published. Rushdie says the fatwa was based on a misunderstanding of his earlier novel, The Satanic Verses, which Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini denounced as an insult to Islam. Coincidentally, Rushdie's memoir, Joseph Anton, was published in the midst of another international uproar. Seventy-five lives were lost in the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan in protests over the film, The Innocence of Muslims — which was very much intended to be an insult to Islam.
