This is an old but good post (from April 2010) by Sana Saeed. She describes what happened when she attended a lecture by Salman Rushdie at her university. I could definitely relate to her feelings about Rushdie before the lecture, and was pleasantly surprised at how the lecture unfolded. For some reason I wasn’t surprised at what he said in the Q&A though.
Update: link is broken, try this one: https://aristotleslackey.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/my-first-time-with-salman-rushdie/
Amongst the most memorable names to cross my ears as a child, growing up in a South Asian Muslim household, was that of (sir) Salman Rushdie. There was always an air of frustration, anger and utter hatred that seemed to accompany it’s mere mention by those of my kin. I was unaware, as a child, precisely what all the fuss was about. What I ended up gathering from the various snippets of conversations and outbursts was that he was a writer who had written some sort of novel in which the Prophet Muhammad, alongside Islam in general, was portrayed in a most vile sense. The grouping of words of those around me – including the words of those on television who would discuss him – was enough to create an authoritative perspective on the issue that I slowly, with a naive mind, took on as my own.
Regardless of what…
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