Unfortunately, it is our “sometimes impossibly difficult” moral duty to go on defending that freedom-“even when the object at the center of things is as indefensibly offensive as Innocence of Muslims. As Rushdie knows, his was always a fight for freedom of expression in the face of tyranny. His story has a serious novel at its center, but that’s not the reason the work required defending. The publication of Rushdie’s “brilliant memoir,” meanwhile, illuminates the differences between the author’s struggle and the one we’ve witnessed in recent weeks. After a fatwa ordering his death was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentines Day in 1989, brilliant novelist Rushdie opted to take the first names of his two favorite writers and combine them into a pseudonym, in order to protect his identity. Though Iran rescinded the fatwa in 1998, a hard-line Iranian religious foundation last week seized on the furor over the Innocence of Muslims video to renew the call for Rushdie’s assassination, offering a $3.3 million reward for the deed. Joseph Anton beautifully modulates between. That observation seems even keener in recent context, said David Remnick in. His story today appears to have been “an opening skirmish in the battle against radical Islam” and a harbinger of terrorist acts to come. Rushdie writes that he at first believed he could make the Muslim world understand that the fatwa reflected a misreading of the novel. But it soon became a reminder of his increasingly fissured sense of self. The alias, shortened to “Joe” by his bodyguards, began as Rushdie’s tribute to two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov. The book gives “a palpable sense of what the fatwa years were like” for the author-moving between safe houses with a security detail of four, hiding from housekeepers in locked bathrooms.

How quickly Rushdie’s life became “a nightmare weirdly like something out of one of his own surreal novels,” said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times.

Novelist joseph anton