Bounties Set for Rushdie Death; Tour Canceled

Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” canceled a planned book promotion tour to the United States late Wednesday after an Iranian cleric offered at least a $1-million reward to anyone who kills him.

Meanwhile, a crowd of about 2,000 angry Muslims pelted the British Embassy in Tehran with stones as a bitter religious and cultural controversy over the London writer’s award-winning novel threatened to escalate into a major international incident.

The latest developments came one day after Iran’s spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, “sentenced to death” Rushdie and his publishers for bringing out a book that allegedly blasphemes Islam and its founder, the Prophet Mohammed.

While Khomeini’s injunction is considered enough to motivate untold thousands of Muslim militants, the reward offered by cleric Hassan Saneie and announced over Iranian State Television appeals to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The Bombay-born son of a wealthy Muslim businessman, Rushdie came to Britain from India as a schoolboy and is now a citizen. His complex, allegorical novel deals with religion and migration.

Rushdie, who denies that his book is blasphemous and charges his critics with assuming the role of “Thought Police,” remained in hiding under armed guard somewhere outside London for a second day.

“The best thing for him to do now is to stay in hiding with a Special Branch (Scotland Yard) man at his side,” United Press International quoted Rushdie’s American wife, Marianne Wiggins, as saying outside the couple’s North London home.

“At the moment no one is thinking of anything except keeping him safe,” added Gayle Miller, an associate of the 41-year-old author’s British agent, Gillon Aitken.

In New York, spokesman Paul Slovak of Viking Penguin, publisher of the American edition, read a statement saying “the current climate is not appropriate for a promotional tour in the U.S.”

Last Sunday, five people were killed in Pakistan when riot police fired into a crowd of anti-Rushdie demonstrators who tried to set fire to the American Cultural Center in the capital of Islamabad. Another died in similar protests in India the next day, and on Wednesday, a Pakistani died of injuries sustained in Sunday’s rioting.

Also Wednesday, French newspapers and radio reported that the Paris publishing house Presses de la Cite has dropped plans to publish a French translation to protect its staff, clients and the public from attacks by Muslims. France has four million Muslim residents.

The British edition of Rushdie’s book has been out since September, although the outcry has only picked up momentum since the first of the year. Last month, the novel was burned in the town square of Bradford in northern England, home to 60,000 of the country’s estimated 1 million Muslims.

A British Foreign Office spokesman said that “our interest at the moment is to try and defuse what could otherwise become an extremely nasty situation.”

The government, which only agreed to re-establish relations with Tehran last November, is pointedly ignoring calls in such prestigious newspapers as the Times of London to sever ties over the affair.

“The undisputed leader of a country with which Britain has diplomatic relations yesterday issued an international murder contract for British subjects,” the Times editorialized Wednesday. It added that it is “impossible to contemplate the maintenance of diplomatic relations with a state whose leader, more unequivocally even than (Libyan leader Moammar) Kadafi, incites to murder.”

Britain’s charge d’affaires in the Iranian capital, Nick Browne, was under instructions to seek clarification of Khomeini’s comments. But he couldn’t get out of the embassy.

Interviewed by BBC radio while the demonstration was under way, Browne described the scene: “It is a very noisy demonstration, and a certain amount of rubbish has been thrown at the embassy, but so far no attempt has been made to break over the embassy walls.”

The demonstration ended later with no injuries, and the Foreign Office spokesman said that the Iranians have offered to meet Browne this morning.

Word of the price put on Rushdie’s head came via Iran’s official news agency. It quoted Saneie, head of an Iranian charity called the 15th Khordad Relief Agency, as saying: “If the executioner is a foreigner he will receive a million dollars” and adding that the reward for an Iranian will be 200 million rials, or about $2.6 million.

Some Iranian experts contend that Khomeini has latched onto the Rushdie controversy to keep alive the reportedly flickering fervor of the 10-year-old Islamic revolution.

“In the last few months he has suffered a number of humiliating setbacks: the cease-fire with Iraq, the election of a woman prime minister in Pakistan . . . ,” wrote Iranian journalist and Khomeini biographer, Amir Taheri, in a column for the Times of London.

“He has therefore been looking for an issue likely to stir the imagination of the poor and illiterate masses. . . . Waving Rushdie’s novel, the ayatollah hopes to tell his supporters that plots against Islam have not ceased and that if one war has ended, another is about to begin.”