Mahshid Amirshahi Harvard University, and has written dozens of articles mostly in Persian with occasional contributions to publications such as "Newsday" (USA) and "Les Temps Modernes" (France) in English and French. One of her notable political stands while in exile has been her instigation of the declaration of the Iranian intellectuals and artists in defence of the British author Salman Rushdie, who had become the object of a notorious manhunt owing to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini against him and his book "The Satanic Verses". Mahshid Amirshahi was one of the founders of the "Comité de défense de Salman Rushdie en
Cat Stevens' comments about Salman Rushdie if Salman Rushdie entered a restaurant in which I was eating, I said, "I would probably call up Ayatollah Khomeini"; and, rather than go to a demonstration to burn an effigy of the author, I jokingly said I would have preferred that it'd be the “real thing”. The content of the broadcast was reported in "The New York Times" on 23 May 1989, a week before the show's planned airing. He and other Muslim participants "objected to cuts" that "omitted the Muslim justification for punishment of blasphemy." According to Stevens, his last comments on the innocence of Rushdie, were not