Salman Rushdie - Secular Values, Human Rights and Islamism

Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian essayist and novelist widely acclaimed for his narrative style that blends myth and fantasy with real life. He has won many awards for his fiction, including the Booker Prize. He is best known for The Satanic Verses which provoked violent reaction from the Muslim community and a fatwa by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and was banned in India and througout the Islamic world. In recent years, Rushdie has been more visible publicly, and speaks out against Islamic extremism, and for secularism and the West. On October 11, 2006, Salman Rushdie addressed an audience at an event sponsored the Center for Inquiry's New York branch, held at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. This special episode of Point of Inquiry features Mr. Rushdie’s remarks, in their entirety, with an introduction by Ibn Warraq. Also in this episode, D.J. Grothe discusses science, the humanities and Islam with noted ex-Muslim Ibn Warraq.