Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie Some commentators have concluded that the character "Bilal X" in Rushdie's book is a caricature of Yusuf Islam. The fictional character Bilal X, a successful African-American former pop singer who has converted to Islam, is portrayed by Rushdie as the "favoured lieutenant" of "the Imam", a character based on the Shia Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Bilal X's "well-nourished, highly trained" voice serves as "a weapon of the West turned against its makers." Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie Following Ayatollah Khomeini's 14 February 1989 death fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, after the publication of Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses", Yusuf Islam,
The Satanic Verses and "Midnight's Children" may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in "Catch-22". "The Satanic Verses" continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories." "The Satanic Verses" also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions to invoke connotative links. Within the book