FACTBOX: Salman Rushdie - a controversial career

(Reuters) -- Writer Salman Rushdie's knighthood for services to literature sparked protests in Malaysia on Wednesday, over a knighthood for the British-Indian author whose novel "The Satanic Verses" outraged many Muslims for its perceived blasphemy against Islam.

Here are some facts on the writer's career and the controversies he has been involved in:

* FROM INDIA TO ENGLAND:

-- Born into a Muslim family in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, on June 19, 1947, Rushdie moved to Pakistan with his family as a teenager before studying at England's Rugby School and reading history at Cambridge University. After working briefly in television in Pakistan, he returned to England and started work as an advertising copywriter.

* FROM ADVERTISING TO WRITING:

-- Rushdie published his first novel, Grimus, in 1975, but shot to fame in 1981 when his second novel, Midnight's Children, a magic realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker Prize. In 1993 the book was judged the 'Booker of Bookers' -- the best winner in the Booker's 25-year history.

* THE SATANIC VERSES FATWA:

-- The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's supreme religious leader, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, on the writer on Radio Tehran on February 14, 1989, calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie because of perceived blasphemy against Islam in his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses.

-- Sparking demonstrations in Pakistan, the 1998 Whitbread Prize winning novel was banned in India and South Africa for its irreverent depiction of early Islamic history.

* "THE PLAGUE YEARS":

-- Rushdie called the novel "pretty mild" and mostly not about Islam, and said he had received many letters of support from Muslim readers. He was however forced into hiding under British government protection during what he called "plague years" up until 1998, when Iran said it no longer supported the fatwa.

* THE "BELLIGERATI" SPAT: -- Rushdie's support of the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia led British-Pakistani writer Tariq Ali to accuse him and other pro-war Western writers, like novelist Martin Amis and journalist Christopher Hitchens, of being warmongering "belligerati," or belligerent literati.

* VEILS AND WOMEN'S RIGHTS:

-- In October 2006 the secularist Rushdie again irritated conservatives by backing British politician Jack Straw's comments that he preferred Muslim women not to wear full face-covering veils when he was talking to them.

-- Rushdie said he agreed that "veils suck" and that none of his three sisters or close friends would ever accept wearing them. He called the battle against face-covering veils a "long and continuing battle against the limitation of women."

* IN HIS OWN WORDS:

"...If you have the great privilege of living in one of the relatively few free societies in the world, use the freedom. The point about freedom is to use it. It's not to say, 'Oh well, it's nice to have the freedom but let's not bother to use it because that would be a bit scary'. Freedom is scary, and it's not peaceful either. It's turbulent. 'Speak' is what I would say."

Sources: Reuters, British Council, Contemporary Writers (www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth87), Muslim Refusenik website interview (www.muslim-refusenik.com/news/rushdie.html)