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 sources, so much so that Muraghi, in his commentary, says: "These traditions are undoubtedly a fabrication of the heretics and foreign hands, and have not been found in any of the authentic books" ... According to Daniel Pipes, when attention was drawn to a book with this title, "Muslims found [it] incredibly sacrilegious", and took it to imply that the book's author claimed that verses of the Qur'an were "the work of the Devil". According to McRoy (2007), other controversial elements included the use of the name Mahound, said to be a derogatory term for Muhammad used by the English