In 1981, Rushdie achieved critical success as an author with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won the Booker McConnell Prize, Britain’s most prestigious award for fiction writing.  In focusing on the fates of those born when the Indian subcontinent was divided, creating the nation of Pakistan, Rushdie’s novel became an allegory for the birth of independent India.  The division of the subcontinent (which occurred just after Rushdie’s birth), and the divided nature of Pakistani culture as it struggled to create a separate identity in a post imperial environment, also contributed to Rushdie’s sense of the tremendous diversity of the postcolonial world.   Describing Pakistan as a “fragmented, frightening palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself,” Rushdie claimed that the history of Pakistan is a “duel between two layers of time, the obscured world forcing its way back through what-had-been-imposed.”  This conception of the postcolonial world as a battle between the repressed traditions of a precolonial past and the imposed traditions of colonial culture appears throughout his fiction, including the story “The Prophet’s Hair.”  But in addition to depicting the chaos and fragmentation that can result from such culture clash, Rusdie’s work also celebrates the vitality and creativity of a process that can give rise to new, more vibrant cultures.
	His work, however, also maintains an awareness of the violence and destruction that can come of adhering too rigidly to past traditions, a danger that became very apparent in his own life with the publication in 1988 of his most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.  The novel is a fantasy/satire featuring two expatriated Indians in Britain, trying to come to terms with their Islamic past in a postmodern, postcolonial society.  A section of the novel describing the birth of a religion similar to Islam was deemed blasphemous by Muslim fundamentalists intent upon protecting their religious traditions from the encroachment of other cultures (particularly Western cultures); and in 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran declared the book an offense to Islam and issued a fatwa (religious proclamation) ordering Rushdie’s assassination, declaring that "Anyone who dies in the cause of ridding the world of Rushdie, will be a martyr and will go directly to heaven.”  The fatwa stated:
	“The author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, against the Prophet of Islam, and against the Koran, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to capital punishment. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to execute this sentence without delay, so that no one henceforth will dare insult the sacred beliefs of the Muslims.”  As a result of the fatwa, two people involved in the novel’s publication were attacked by Muslim extremists (one, a Japanese translator, was killed), and Rushdie was forced to go into hiding under the protection of the British government.  The Satanic Verses was banned in most Islamic countries, including India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.