SOURCE: An interview with Salman Rushdie, in Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1996, p. 3.

In the following interview, Blades queries Rushdie on religion and the effect of the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence on his writing.

Name: Salman Rushdie

Job: Subversive novelist

Seven years after Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for blaspheming the prophet Mohammed in "The Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie recently emerged from deep cover in England to launch his latest novel, The Moor's Last Sigh. Born in India but now a British citizen, Rushdie managed to greatly offend "Mother India" with his new book, a dysfunctional family saga that's a savage satire of Hindu fundamentalism and a cruel and inhuman comedy best exemplified by his joke about "kebabed saints and tandooried martyrs".

[Blades:] Considering the evidence in The Moor's Last Sigh, you do seem genuinely disturbed about the more extreme forms of Hinduism in India.

[Rushdie:] I'm...