The Satanic Verses controversy traditions themselves see Abraham as not without fault and deserving of criticism; that Rushdie referred to Mohammed as "Mahound", a conjurer, a magician and a false prophet, yet these remarks are made by a drunken apostate, a character with whom neither reader nor author has any sympathy; that the book insults the wives of the Prophet by having whores use their names, yet the wives are explicitly said to be chaste and the adoption of their names by whores is to symbolise the corruption of the city then being described (perhaps symbolising Mecca in its pre-Islamic state); that the book
Salman Rushdie Afghanistan, which began in 2001, but was a vocal critic of the 2003 war in Iraq. He has stated that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of Saddam Hussein", US unilateral military intervention was unjustifiable. In the wake of the "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy in March 2006—which many considered an echo of the death threats and "fatwā" that followed publication of "The Satanic Verses" in 1989—Rushdie signed the manifesto "Together Facing the New Totalitarianism", a statement warning of the dangers of religious extremism. The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French weekly "Charlie Hebdo" in