The Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci, who died on Thursday, in recent years became better known for her diatribes against Islam than for her long record as a war correspondent.
ROME: The Italian reporter Oriana Fallaci, who died on Thursday, in recent years became better known for her diatribes against Islam than for her long record as a war correspondent.
After a career spanning over half a century during which she covered most of the planet's major wars and interviewed a string of world leaders, Fallaci hit headlines in her own right following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Typical of her outspoken attacks on Islam was an article she wrote for the Corriere della Sera newspaper in July last year, where she described the religion both as "an enemy in the house" of the West and "incompatible with democracy."
"We are at war: do you accept that, yes or no?" she wrote, adding that the integration of Muslims into western society was a "nightmare."
She argued that Islam's holy book, the Koran, was "incompatible with freedom, incompatible with democracy and incompatible with human rights," and she refused to accept that Islamic extremists were but a small minority of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims.
Her inflammatory stance earned her lawsuits in both Italy and France, although to date none of them have resulted in rulings against her.
Last year she was granted an audience with Pope Benedict XVI at his summer residence in Castel Gandolfo, even though she had described herself as an atheist Christian.
Oriana Fallaci was born in June 1929 in Florence, where she studied at the faculty of medicine before becoming a professional journalist as early as 1950.
From 1967 on she was to report on the Vietnam War, the Indo-Pakistan war and a string of subsequent conflicts in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
Among world leaders she interviewed, sometimes to devastating effect, were the Vietnam era United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, the Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini and the late Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
For many years Fallaci divided her time between homes in Florence and New York, where she wrote for the New York Times, Life, The Washington Post and other major newspapers.
She never married, but for several years in the 1970s she was the companion of Alekos Panagoulis, a Greek poet and activist who had been jailed and tortured for his bitter fight against his country's military regime in the early 1960s.
She devoted her book A Man to Panagoulis after he died in a car crash, widely believed to have been not accidental, in 1979.
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