It was on Valentine’s Day of 1989 that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa decreeing that author Salman Rushdie should be executed on grounds of blasphemy for the novel, as should anyone who helped in its release. Riots, death threats, bomb threats and a few murders ensued; Rushdie himself had to spend almost a decade in hiding. Scholar Kevin Blankinship looks back at both “the Rushdie Affair” (which few people under age 30 know about) and what really is, and is not, in the book. — Los Angeles Review of Books