Knighthood of Salman Rushdie All other aspects were for the main committee to examine. The British Foreign Office, which has a permanent secretary on the main committee, announced that there had been no requests to gauge possible Muslim reaction to the knighthood. It was noted that Rushdie's 13 books have won numerous awards, including the Booker Prize for "Midnight's Children" in 1981, the Booker of Bookers prize, the Whitbread novel award (twice), and the James Tait Black memorial prize. PEN International had been a constant supporter of Rushdie being honoured, believing that awarding the author (born in India) would be "seen as a positive
Salman Rushdie medieval form of unreason. Rushdie called the attack a consequence of "religious totalitarianism" which according to him had caused "a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam".: He strongly supports feminism. In the 1980s in the United Kingdom, he was a supporter of the Labour Party and championed measures to end racial discrimination and alienation of immigrant youth and racial minorities. Rushdie supported the 1999 NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading the leftist Tariq Ali to label Rushdie and other "warrior writers" as "the belligerati'". He was supportive of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in