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 Blasphemers' Banquet fair and balanced and wrote that the Archbishop "should have held his peace". The Blasphemers' Banquet The Blasphemers' Banquet is a film-poem created in 1989 by English poet and playwright Tony Harrison which examines censorship arising from religious issues. It was created in part as a response to the Salman Rushdie controversy surrounding his publication of "The Satanic Verses". It was aired by the BBC 1 programme "Byline" on 31 July 1989. The verse-film is set at the Omar Khayyám restaurant in Bradford where Harrison is holding a banquet with invited guests such as Omar Khayyám, Salman Rushdie, Voltaire, Molière