Joseph Anton: A Memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir is an autobiographical book by the British Indian writer, Salman Rushdie. It was published in September 2012 by Random House. Rushdie used "Joseph Anton" as a pseudonym while in hiding following the fatwa that had been issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual and political leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, in the midst of criticism by some Muslims and a widespread controversy over Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses" (1988). He chose the name to honor the writers Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Rushdie was annoyed when police officers called him by
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