The Satanic Verses controversy country has not forgotten the vow to kill him. He was also quoted saying, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat". One of the immediate consequences of the fatwa was a worsening of Islamic-Western relations. Rushdie lamented that the controversy fed the Western stereotype of "the backward, cruel, rigid Muslim, burning books and threatening to kill the blasphemer", while another British writer compared the Ayatollah Khomeini "with a familiar ghost from the past – one of those villainous Muslim clerics, a Faqir of Ipi or a mad Mullah, who used to be
The Satanic Verses controversy the UK. When it was published in the United States, six months later (in February 1989), it received renewed attention, and the protests took a more deadly form. On 12 February 1989, a 10,000-strong protest against Rushdie and the book took place in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and an American Express office was ransacked. On 14 February, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran and one of the most prominent Shi'a Muslim leaders, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. This created a major