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Although Rushdie
published an apology and a statement of his belief in Islam in 1990, the fatwa
was not lifted, and he remained in hiding for 9 years, until the government
of Iran backed away from the fatwa in 1998 as part of an
attempt to re-establish diplomatic relations with Britain for commercial
purposes. The death threat, however,
was never formally rescinded, and many religious groups still consider it in
effect, including Khordad-15, a Muslim organization that has placed a $2.5
million bounty on Rushdie.
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The incident
reinforced in reality the themes that had been central to Rushdie’s fantastic
fiction—the power of native cultural traditions threatened by change, and the
danger of denying past traditions too completely or, on the other hand,
adhering to them too rigidly and blindly resisting change. The fatwa became the subject of
international debate, and as The Norton Anthology notes, Rushdie
himself “became symbolic of the vulnerability of the intellectual in the face
of fundamentalism” (p. 2842).
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