SOURCE: "Doomed in Bombay," in The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1996, p. 7.

In the following review, Rush praises The Moor's Last Sigh as an apt response to the tyrannical reaction to The Satanic Verses.

Salman Rushdie's new novel, his first since the infamous fatwa issued by the Iranian Government in 1989 as punishment for putatively blasphemous passages in his satire The Satanic Verses, comes heavily attended by certain inevitable questions. How is Mr. Rushdie holding up after six years in hiding? What kind of story is the world's most famous living author, in this extraordinary situation, going to tell us and, of course, himself? Is this another book that will give offense, and to whom? Will this book comment, directly or otherwise, on the dogma-driven expansion of censorship and persecution affecting writers in so many parts of the world? It's only when we've worked through this vanguard of...