God Is Not Great the prayer meeting breaks up". He discusses the 1989 fatwa issued on author and friend Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini because of the contents of Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses". He criticises several public figures for laying the blame for the incident on Rushdie himself. He also writes about the events following the September 11 attacks, describing how religion, particularly major religious figures, allowed matters to "deteriorate in the interval between the removal of the Taliban and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein". Hitchens discusses the prohibition on eating pigs ("porcophobia" as Hitchens calls it) in Judaism, also adopted by
Haroun and the Sea of Stories of the story deal with the problems of censorship: an issue particularly pertinent to Rushdie because of the fatwa against him backed by Ayatollah Khomeini. The book is highly allusive and puns in multiple languages. Many of the major character's names allude to some aspect of speech or silence. It was made into an audiobook read by Rushdie himself. At the beginning of the story, protagonist Haroun Khalifa lives with his father Rashid, a famous storyteller, and his mother Soraya, until the latter is seduced by their neighbor 'Mr. Sengupta' to leave home. Thereafter Rashid is hired to speak on