It has, from the beginning, been a story much stranger than fiction; if a novel had been so riddled with ironies, it would have been condemned for implausibility. In Salman Rushdie and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the world has two master plotters, celebrated controversialists both, with unusually lively imaginations, each of them now in his own embattled hideout while the War of the Words rages on. Yet even Jorge Luis Borges -- or Rushdie -- could scarcely have dreamed up a scene in which a Muhammadan cleric vows to kill Salman Rushdie for a book in which the Prophet condemns an apostate...
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