Ahmed Deedat convert to Christianity. Hindus and Christians had respected his oratory skills and arguments until then. But now, they rejected Deedat and united with other South African Muslim organisations in denouncing his attacks on other religions. Two years later, Jews joined the criticism after Deedat published "Arab and Israel – Conflict or Conciliation?" In 1988, following the publication of Salman Rushdie’s fictional work "The Satanic Verses", Deedat supported the fatwā of the Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie's death. He said that Rushdie "is a hypocrite and has blasphemed holy personalities. He should not be pardoned." In his last tour to Australia,
Salman Rushdie Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was "Martyred in London, 3 August 1989. The first martyr to die on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh's mother was invited to relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs' Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands of Iranian soldiers slain in the Iran–Iraq War. During the 2006 "Jyllands-Posten" Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's "fatwā" against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France