Excerpt:
TWENTY years ago today, Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. Four years in the making and supported by a then almost unheard of advance of $850,000 from his publisher, Penguin, Rushdie had hoped the work would cement his reputation as the most important British novelist of his generation. The book certainly set the world alight, though not quite in the way it was meant to.
The Satanic Verses was, Rushdie said in an interview before publication, a novel about "migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death". It was also a satire on Islam, "a serious attempt", in his words, "to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person". For some, that was unacceptable, turning the novel, in the words of British Muslim philosopher Shabbir Akhtar, into a piece of "hate literature". Within a month, The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie's native India, after protests from Islamic radicals.
By the end of the year, protesters had burned a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, in northern England. Then, on February 14, 1989, came the event that transformed the Rushdie affair: Iran's spiritual leader, the ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued his fatwa.
"I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses - which has been compiled, printed and published in opposition to Islam, the prophet and the Koran - and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents are sentenced to death," he proclaimed.