Raised in India and Pakistan and educated in England, Sir Salman Rushdie is one of the most celebrated and controversial authors and critics of our time. His novel The Satanic Verses provoked a fatwa (religious edict) by Ayatollah Khomeini calling for his death, as a result of which he spent nearly a decade “underground,” seldom appearing in public. A leading proponent for free speech, Rushdie was knighted by the British Government in 2007.