Hyderabad: A quote reportedly by Salman Rushdie about Muslims is widely circulating on social media.
The quote reads, "Muslims, whether they live in Pakistan or India, Nigeria or Syria, whether they are poor or rich, illiterate or educated, their only goal is to destroy the whole nation by terrorism, bomb blasts, population explosion, riots and jihad in the name of Islam." It is attributed to Salman Rushdie.
Fact Check
NewsMeter performed a keyword search and found a tweet by Salman Rushdie dismissing the post as fake. He clarified that he had never made such a comment.
We also found another tweet by Rushdie where he thanks a Twitter user @LucyGoesHard for finding the source of the fake quote.
An Outlook article titled "Salman Rushdie: The Man Who 'Provoked' The Muslim World," discusses the author's controversial book The Satanic Verses that led to Ayatollah Khomeini, the then Supreme Leader of Iran, issuing a fatwa in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.
"Some critics continue to believe that Rushdie exploited his freedom in order to disparage Muslim beliefs. However, to Rushdie, literature must be "provocative" and "it always has been" so," the article further read.
Though Salman Rushdie has been critical of Islamic ideologies, we could not find any such post or video that suggests he made such a comment about the Muslim community. Hence, the post is false.