Author Rushdie launches faculty appointment to Emory University

<p>Author Salman Rushdie launched a five-year appointment to the Emory University faculty Tuesday, one day before the 18th anniversary of the death threat that catapulted him into worldwide fame.</p><p>The 59-year-old Rushdie will hold lectures, teach classes and work with students for several weeks each year. He also is donating his archive to the university.</p><p>"This offered the opportunity to go into much greater depth with a subject and a group of students," Rushdie said.</p><p>He also said the reason he picked Emory "because they asked me and nobody else ever had."</p><p>Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses," was forced into hiding for a decade after the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a 1989 fatwa, or opinion on Islamic law, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie because the book allegedly insulted Islam.</p><p>In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support but could not rescind the fatwa.</p><p>The archive will include notes, photographs, manuscripts, letters and two of Rushdie's early unpublished novels. It also features the private journal Rushdie kept detailing his life under the fatwa, said Steve Enniss, director of Emory's Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library.</p>

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