The Satanic Verses controversy and in December signed a declaration "affirming his Islamic faith and calling for Viking-Penguin, the publisher of "The Satanic Verses", neither to issue the book in paperback nor to allow it to be translated". This also failed to move supporters of the fatwa and by mid-2005 Rushdie was condemning Islamic fundamentalism as a A memoir of his years of hiding, titled "Joseph Anton", was published on 18 September 2012. Joseph Anton was Rushdie's secret alias. The passionate international rage of Muslims towards the book surprised many Western readers because the book was written in English, not Arabic, Urdu, Persian or
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