The Rushdie effect

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Twenty years ago this month, on September 26 1988, Salman Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, a work in the magical-realist tradition, was launched at a party for the literary elite. The book’s two main protagonists survive a fall from a wrecked aircraft and turn into an angel (Gibreel, or Gabriel) and the devil (Shaitan, or Satan). The book also contains a series of transgressions against Muslim sensibilities: the title itself referred to a much-disputed passage in the Koran in which Mohammed was apparently tricked by Satan.

Not long after this launch party, the book’s publishers, Viking Penguin (owned by the FT’s parent company, Pearson), and Margaret Thatcher’s government received angry calls from Muslims for the book’s withdrawal. India forbade its publication, and bans followed in Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa and Sri Lanka. By early 1989 this reaction had spread to other countries with sizeable Muslim populations: Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and even Venezuela.

Then, in February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa, or ruling on Islamic law, calling for Rushdie’s murder. Though the author swiftly made a statement regretting the distress caused by the publication, Khomeini’s office wrote: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents ... it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and wealth, to send him to hell.” At this point Rushdie largely disappeared from public life and into safe houses, behind police protection.

In April 1989 two big London bookshops, Dillons and Collets, were bombed. The following month there were further explosions in London, York and High Wycombe, while unexploded bombs were discovered in other bookshops. Hitoshi Igarashi, the book’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in July 1991; Ettore Capriolo, who translated it into Italian, was stabbed (but survived) in August of the same year; William Nygaard, the book’s Norwegian publisher, just escaped assassination in October 1993. In July of that year, a gang had set fire to a hotel in Sivas, Turkey, where the late Aziz Nesin, the book’s Turkish translator, was meeting other intellectuals: 37 died (though not Nesin).

. . .

At the time I was little concerned with the issue. I was absorbed in and, for much of my time, living in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, where communism’s collapse seemed to foreshadow a world of liberal democratic states.

Few, if any, western thinkers guessed that the fury of Muslim groups in Europe, and of Muslim states outside it, was a harbinger of the return of another, older history, in which the imperatives of faith and the settlement of insults against personal and religious honour were in the ascendant. The intellectual and literary class in Britain and elsewhere rallied to Rushdie. But the Satanic Verses controversy seemed just a sideshow, if a vicious one, driven by an individual, Khomeini, who was derisively referred to in the tabloids as the “mad mullah”.

I knew no Muslims well, and little about their communities: in this, I was typical not just of British citizens but of journalists. Outside local journalism in already ethnically diverse cities like Leicester, Bradford and Birmingham, the activities of British minority groups were hardly covered: their intellectual currents not at all.