Book description
In 1989, after the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Salman
Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, Fay Weldon published
Sacred Cows, a pamphlet critical of the fundamentalist
interpretation of the Koran.
Weldon's pamphlet received a lot of attention on publication -
mostly criticism of her perceived 'Islamophobia' - but Weldon set out
to enforce the notion that no religion should have the right to issue
threats and intimidation; no religion should hinder free expression.
In Sacred Cows, Weldon criticizes all aspects of British
society - Murdoch and the Sun's page 3 girls; white, liberal
complacence; problems with education and the NHS - and argues that the
affront to Muslim people in Britain was not caused by publication of
The Satanic Verses itself but rather by the 'awfulness of the
society we have allowed to grow up around us'. The Satanic
Verses is remedy, according to Weldon, to a fractured, ailing
society. Publishing literature like this proves that our society 'may
yet be well and our brave new God of individual conscience may yet arise'.
Originally published by Chatto & Windus as part of the 'Chatto
Counterblasts' strand, this ebook edition is reissued with a new
introduction by the author, as part of the Brain Shots series: the
pre-eminent source for high quality, short-form digital non-fiction.
Novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, Fay Weldon CBE was brought
up in New Zealand and returned to the United Kingdom when she was ten.
She read Economics and Psychology at the University of St Andrews in
Scotland, and worked briefly for the Foreign Office in London, then as
a journalist, and then as an advertising copywriter. She later gave up
her career in advertising, and began to write full-time. Her first
novel, The Fat Woman's Joke, was published in 1967. She was
Chair of the Judges for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1983, and
received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews in
1990. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE.
Fay Weldon's work includes over twenty novels, five collections of
short stories, several children's books, non-fiction books, magazine
articles and a number of plays written for television, radio and the
stage, including the pilot episode for the television series
'Upstairs, Downstairs'.
Fay's memoir, Auto Da Fay, was published in 2002 by
HarperCollins who also published her latest nonfiction work What
Makes Women Happy (Fourth Estate) in September 2006. Quercus
published The Stepmother's Diary in September 2008, and her
novel Chalcot Crescent was published in September 2009 by Corvus,
followed by Kehua! in 2010. She is currently working on her
Love & Inheritance trilogy for Head of Zeus, who published the
first in the series, Habits of the House, in June 2012.
