Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British-American novelist and professor was born on 19 June 1947 in Bombay, British India.
Growing up in Bombay, now Mumbai, Rushdie attended the Cathedral and John Connon School in Fort, South Bombay.
When he relocated to England from India, he attended Rugby School in Warwickshire and then on to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree in history from King’s College, Cambridge.
Rushdie’s career began in advertising where worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather and then with Ayer Barker. He started his writing career with his first novel titled Grimus in 1975. Grimus was a part-science fiction tale.
His second novel Midnight’s Children which he started writing while still at Ogilvy & Mather and released in 1981, brought him to the limelight in literary circles.
Rushdie has been married four times and has been resident in the United States since 2000. He is a staunch supporter of the English football club Tottenham Hotspur.
Salman Rushdie Religion: Is He Still A Muslim?
Salman Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family, but he is now an atheist. Rushdie called himself a “hardline atheist” in a 2006 interview with PBS.
In 1989, in an interview following the fatwa, Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though “shaped by Muslim culture more than any other”, and a student of Islam.
The same year in another interview, he said, “My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu.”
In 1990, in the “hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him”, he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam made by characters in his novel, and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world.
Later, Rushdie said that he was only “pretending”.
Source:Kingaziz.com