The proclamation of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, urging all "zealous muslitns" to execute Rushdie, indelibly inscribed on public consciousness an image of Rushdie as a writer inextricably involved with the political issues his work addressed. While The Satanic Verses (1988) was the proximate cause for the fatwa, all of Rushdie's novels have contained material that some people found offensive, and as he himself has often reiterated, he is a "fairly political animal" who has observed about Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame (1983) "that everything in both books has had to do with politics and with the relationship of the individuals and history." This continuing concern was concentrated for Rushdie by the necessity of concealment caused by the fatwa, and when he resumed writing in 1990, he reaffirmed his political position, saying, "If I can't write, then, in a way, the attack has been successful...