Marianne Wiggins natural voice." Wiggins lived in London for 16 years, and for brief periods in Paris, Brussels and Rome. In January 1988, she married the novelist Salman Rushdie in London. On February 14, 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a "Fatwa" ordering Rushdie's assassination for alleged blasphemy in his book, "The Satanic Verses". Although Wiggins had told Rushdie only five days prior that she wished to end their marriage, she nevertheless went into hiding along with him. In 1993, the two divorced. Wiggins currently lives in Los Angeles, California, where she has been in the English department of the University of
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