Naguib Mahfouz Prize. Like many Egyptian writers and intellectuals, Mahfouz was on an Islamic fundamentalist "death list". He defended Salman Rushdie after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini condemned Rushdie to death in 1989, but also criticized his "The Satanic Verses" as "insulting" to Islam. Mahfouz believed in freedom of expression, and, although he did not personally agree with Rushdie's work, he did not believe that there should be a "fatwa" condemning him to death for it. In 1989, after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's "fatwa" calling for Salman Rushdie and his publishers to be killed, Mahfouz called Khomeini a terrorist. Shortly after Mahfouz joined 80 other
Salman Rushdie elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In September 2015, he joined the New York University Journalism Faculty as a Distinguished Writer in Residence. Though he enjoys writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if his writing career had not been successful. Even from early childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he later realised in his frequent cameo appearances). Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some of his writings. He had a cameo appearance in the film "Bridget Jones's Diary" based on the book of