Salman

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.

WASHINGTON -- The first legal challenge to alleged bias against Arab-Americans since the Mideast war began is spreading rapidly, getting Pan American World Airways into deeper trouble.Pan Am, already being hauled into court and before a city human rights agency in New York City for denying a ticket to an Iraqi national, is facing the prospect of additional lawsuits elsewhere in the country in coming days, legal sources said yesterday."It wouldn't hurt to have Pan Am know that it will have other lawsuits in other places," according to one civil rights lawyer, who asked not to be identified.

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.