Susan Sontag PEN writers' organization. After Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a "fatwa" death sentence against writer Salman Rushdie for blasphemy after the publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses" that year, Sontag's uncompromising support of Rushdie was crucial in rallying American writers to his cause. A few years later, during the Siege of Sarajevo, Sontag gained attention for directing a production of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" in a candlelit theatre in the Bosnian city. In the "Daily Telegraph", Kevin Myers called it "mesmerisingly precious and hideously self-indulgent." and wrote, "By my personal reckoning, the performance lasted as long as the
Political thought and legacy of Ruhollah Khomeini Rushdie in particular was seen by some as a deft attempt to create a wedge issue that would prevent Muslims from imitating the West by "dividing Muslims from Westerners along the default lines of culture." The fatwa was greeted with headlines such as one in the popular British newspaper the "Daily Mirror" referring to Khomeini as "that Mad Mullah", observations in a British magazine that the Ayatollah seemed "a familiar ghost from the past - one of those villainous Muslim clerics, a Faqir of Ipi or a mad Mullah, who used to be portrayed, larger than life, in popular histories