1989 Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988. It received perplexed reviews in the London literary press – where it was widely seen as something of a disappointment from the author of the Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children. No (London) reviewer found the novel offensive.
Offence was taken in Saudi Arabia (whose moral guardians had had longstanding suspicions about Rushdie). The novel caught fire – literally – on 14 January, when a thousand Muslim protesters marched through Bradford with a copy of The Satanic Verses tied to a stake. The book was ritually burned. The media had been forewarned and cameras were present in force.1
Book-burning is always telegenic and CNN picked up the event. There ensued riots in the Indian subcontinent. In Iran (which had current political resentments against the UK), on 14 February, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against the British author Rushdie and his British publishers (Penguin) for The Satanic Verses. Any devout assassin was guaranteed entry to paradise and a multi-million-dollar reward for ridding the world of the literary apostate and blasphemer (as Rushdie was proscribed).
In his later novel The Ground Beneath her Feet (2000), written in series of safe houses under the protection of Britain’s Special Branch, Rushdie labels the fatwa a ‘Valentine card’, echoing Jean Cocteau’s ironic comment that harsh criticisms of literature are the love letters of disappointed suitors. He would need to take refuge (initially under the government of ‘Mrs Torcher’ – satirised in The Satanic Verses) for a decade and a half.
The principal ground of offence perceived by Islamists in The Satanic Verses is commonly misunderstood. It was not merely the use of the abusive occidental name ‘Mahound’ for the Prophet, nor his (alleged) lecherousness. It was the novel’s contention that the Koran was not the immutably received word of God, but – effectively – fiction (embellished by the Prophet’s secretary, ‘Salman the Persian’). That it is, effectively, a wonderful work of fiction, God’s Novel.
Predictably, the furore made Rushdie’s novel (still as impenetrable to the majority of Western readers as Finnegans Wake) a bestseller. Nothing gets a book going so successfully as flames licking around its covers (in front of the cameras, of course).
1 The incineration may be viewed on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/feb/11/satanic-verses-rushdie-fatwa-khomeini