The book’s title may confuse many: “Joseph Anton: A Memoir.”
The title is the fictional name Rushdie adopted while in hiding. British police told him to make up a name and he chose the first names of two of his favorite authors: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
Rushdie said, “I made it the title of the book because it always felt very strange to be asked to give up my name. I was always uncomfortable about it, and I thought it might help dramatize, for the reader, the deep strangeness and discomfort of those years.”
Rushdie has often described his life in hiding as boring, but he has managed to produce a 656-page tome about it.
This is Rushdie’s 16th book and fifth non-fiction effort.
Rushdie was spirited from hiding place to hiding place for a decade after Khomeini issued a death fatva against him on St. Valentine’s Day 1989, just a few months before Khomeini died. Khomeini condemned Rushdie for writing “The Satanic Verses,” which some saw as demeaning the Prophet and Islam.
The book had been in print for many months and had not drawn any comment from the Islamic Republic until riots against the book erupted in Pakistan. Khomeini then made opposition to the book and to Rushdie a cause.
Many European countries pulled their ambassadors out of Tehran as a result and the Islamic Republic went into its second period of being shunned around the globe, the first being during the detention of the US embassy hostages.
The government in Tehran has always said that the fatva is a religious decree that the government cannot rescind, but that it does not enforce.