![]() On February 15, 1989, a day after the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa condemning him to death for his authorship of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie appeared on British television and announced that he wished his book had been “more critical” of Islam. The position that Rushdie took during this literary-domestic spat uncannily prefigured the position he would take nine years later, when confronted by the wrath of another, more punishing patriarch. “My father had studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to have a sophisticated response to the book, but the person who did was my mother…. ![]() Rushdie fils did not deny that Sinai was based on his father-“In my young, pissed-off way,” he would later tell The Paris Review, “I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out”-but he objected to his father’s wounded reaction and thought it revealed a crude understanding of how novels worked. ![]() ![]() When Anis Rushdie read his son’s novel Midnight’s Children for the first time in 1980, he became convinced that Ahmed Sinai, the drunken father in the book, was a satirical portrait of himself. ![]()
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