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
Salman Rushdie Zia-ul-Haq. "Shame" won France's "Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger" (Best Foreign Book) and was a close runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of postcolonial literature are characterised by a style of magic realism and the immigrant outlook that Rushdie is very conscious of as a member of the Kashmiri diaspora. Rushdie wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua in 1987 called "The Jaguar Smile". This book has a political focus and is based on his first-hand experiences and research at the scene of Sandinista political experiments. His most controversial work, "The Satanic Verses", was published in 1988 (see section