Desc: Salman Rushdie: Death on a trail: Directed by William Karel. With Salman Rushdie, Michel Papineschi, Beulah Borr, Gerd Wameling. When The Satanic Verses were published in 1988, no one yet perceived the rise of Muslim fundamentalism or its consequences. Not even its author, who will live 30 years under the threat of a fatwa pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini.