“The mistake of the West was to put the Sauds on the throne of Saudi Arabia and give them control of the world's oil fortune, which they then used to propagate Wahhabi Islam.”

Indian-born British and American novelist

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. He is known for fiction that blends magical realism with historical elements, and for writing about movement, rupture, and exchange between Eastern and Western worlds. His novels are often set on the Indian subcontinent and frequently center Indian characters or family life. Midnight's Children, his second novel, won the Booker Prize in 1981, and later it was selected twice as the best of all Booker winners, for the prize's 25th and 40th anniversaries.