Berlin varsity honours Rushdie

[Ulhas Joglekar]

27 November 1999 
Berlin varsity honours Rushdie
BERLIN: Flanked by two Nobel laureates, Indian-born author Salman Rushdie
received an honorary doctorate for his life's work from Berlin's Free
University during a ceremony marked by heavy security.
Guests invited to the presentation Thursday were asked to show up two hours
early because of stringent security checks. Rushdie has lived cautiously
since 1989 when Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling
for his death, after asserting that Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses
blasphemed Islam.
Iran disassociated itself from the fatwa last year, but security officials
still remain alert during Rushdie's public appearances.
Rushdie, who holds a British citizenship, was joined at the ceremony by
German writer Guenter Grass, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize for
Literature, and Kenzaburo Oe of Japan, the 1994 winner.
Dieter Lenzen, the university's deputy president, praised Rushdie as a
``world ranking'' writer. He said that had Rushdie submitted one of his
works to the university as a dissertation, ``we would have made you a
regular doctor summa cum laude long ago.''
Following the presentation, Rushdie read some passages from his new book,
The Ground Under Her Feet. (AP)
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