Salman Rushdie

LONDON -- Salman Rushdie, the author condemned to death by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was received unexpectedly yesterday by Prime Minister John Major in his Parliament office.Mr. Rushdie had asked for the meeting with the prime minister as a demonstration of Britain's commitment to protecting him and as a forceful repudiation of the fatwa, or death sentence, issued by the ayatollah in 1989 and still held in force by the current rulers of Iran.Mr. Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" was interpreted by the ayatollah as blasphemous to Islam, was smuggled into the prime minister's private office.

Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" is a novel in which the two main characters bounce unpredictably through time and space, past and present.Today, exactly four years after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini imposed a death sentence on Mr. Rushdie for blaspheming Islam in his book, the creator of those fantastic travelers remains an earth-bound prisoner of the late Ayatollah's edict, or fatwa, which comes with a bounty of more than $2 million. Guarded by British police, moved from safe house to safe house, Mr. Rushdie is frozen in the present, his future on hold.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- Salman Rushdie, the English novelist living under an Iranian death threat for writing the book "The Satanic Verses," made a dramatic and unexpected appearance here last night to plead for U.S. pressure to end "state-sponsored professional terrorism."Last night's appearance is only the second time Mr. Rushdie has appeared in the United States since February 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ordered his death for writing a novel that Muslims say unfairly depicts the prophet Mohammed.

IN GABRIEL Garcia Marquez's haunting novella "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," a man is killed in full view of his neighbors, who all knew of the impending murder.Some felt the execution was deserved, others refused to believe the warnings, most procrastinated and a few tried to intervene, but their dreamlike actions had no effect.Ask the U.S. government, the British government and the United Nations what they are doing to lift Iran's death sentence against Salman Rushdie.Officials will condemn terrorism and offer comforting words.

The hearts of the nation go out to Terry Anderson, who emerged from nearly seven years of inhuman torture and incarceration whole in body and buoyant in spirit. Neither his government nor the world was allowed to forget him. For that, credit goes to his sister, Peggy Say, and to his employer, the Associated Press. For his survival, the credit is to his own inner resources.Mr. Anderson is the longest-held surviving American hostage seized by terrorists in Lebanon in the anarchic 1980s, kidnapped on March 16, 1985.

MY QUEASY stomach generally keeps me from attending Ku Klux Klan rallies and similar events which some brave souls attend just to see what the hatemongers are up to. Thus I didn't get to a recent gathering in Potomac, little more than a stone's throw from where I live.Something billed as an educational lecture was delivered there in the mosque of the Islamic Education Center by Yusuf Islam, a British subject formerly known as pop singer Cat Stevens. Stevens/Islam was touring the U.S. to raise money for Muslim schools, and the Potomac meeting was his kickoff appearance.

IMAGINARY HOMELANDS:ESSAYS AND CRITICISM,1981-1991.Salman Rushdie.Granta Books/Viking.` 432 pages. $24.95. Two years ago, the world's toughest book critic took on Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses." In a scenario familiar to literary editors, free-lancer Ayatollah Khomeini savaged his subject so excessively that he turned his hated novelist into a household name.But even an ayatollah can't work miracles. He couldn't turn a serious, Indian-born British intellectual into a household voice.

The irreverent, Indian-born, British author Salman Rushdie now says he repents having written "The Satanic Verses" and has renewed his faith in Islam. This, however, is not enough for fundamentalist Muslim leaders in Iran and Britain; their death sentence against the author still stands. In Iran, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei says to do otherwise would change the "divine ruling" of his late predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, whose mobs seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran 11 years ago. In Britain, the head of the Muslim Youth Movement has imposed conditions he admits Mr. Rushie can never meet.

ON MONDAY Salman Rushdie tried to make peace with those who would have him dead. It was outrageous to begin with that the Ayatollah Khomeini should have declared a holy war on Rushdie's creative imagination. The least the nations of the world can now do is insist that Iran lift the death sentence.Rushdie, in the presence of an Egyptian secretary of state and other moderate Muslims, signed a statement embracing the Muslim faith and disavowing sections of his novel "The Satanic Verses" for which the ayatollah two years ago called on Muslims worldwide to take Rushdie's life.

LONDON -- Author Salman Rushdie embraced Islam yesterday and said that his book "The Satanic Verses" would not be published in paperback and that he did not personally agree with some statements in the book that most offend Moslems.Mr. Rushdie, 43, issued the statement in an attempt to get Iran and fundamentalist Moslems to lift the death sentence under which he has lived for 22 months. But fundamentalist British Moslem leaders said that it wasn't enough and that nothing short of withdrawal of the book from stores would remove the sentence pronounced by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.