When Salman Rushdie wrote his novel The Satanic Verses in September 1988, he thought that the many references to Islam might cause controversy.
“I expected that a few mullahs would be offended, would call me names, and then I would be able to defend myself publicly,” Rushdie told an interviewer much later.
The Indian-born author worked as an advertising copywriter, coining slogans such as “naughty but nice” for cream cakes, for example. He had no idea of the tsunami of outrage that would darken the rest of his life, or that it was about to become a geopolitical trap.
By October 1988, he needed a bodyguard in the face of a flurry of death threats, travel cancellations, and squatting. One Muslim-majority country after another banned the book, and in December, thousands of Muslims demonstrated in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and burned a pile of books. In Islamabad, six people were killed when a mob attacked a US cultural center in the Pakistani capital to protest the book. There were riots in Srinagar and Kashmir.
The day after these riots, on February 14, 1989, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, calling on all Muslims to execute not only Rushdie, but everyone involved in the publication of the book. The fatwa effectively carved the threat of death into stone, making it impossible to erase. The Iranian Religious Foundation offered a $1 million reward, $3 million if an Iranian did the killing. Iran cut off relations with the UK over this issue.
Rushdie went into hiding and lived for several years, most of the time in a remote farmhouse in Wales, under the pseudonym Joseph Anton, glorifying his literary heroes Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In 2012, he published a memoir about his life on the run under this title.
Western intellectuals have largely flocked to Rushdie’s defense, portraying the issue as a litmus test of the West’s willingness to uphold the principle of free speech in the face of a deadly threat.
Bookshops in the UK and US were soon faced with an urgent need to decide how they felt about the issue in the face of a wave of incendiary bombings of stores that kept selling it.
In February 1989, Rushdie expressed remorse, saying, “I deeply regret the suffering this publication has caused to sincere followers of Islam.” However, these words had little effect. In June 1989, Khomeini died, but the fatwa continued under his successor, the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and new efforts appear to have been made to enforce it. Later that month, a Lebanese-Guinean who identified himself as Mustafa Mazeh blew himself up in a hotel in Paddington, west London, with a bomb ready to kill Rushdie.
In 1990, Rushdie again expressed remorse, said he had converted to Islam, disagreed with the views expressed by the characters in the novel, and opposed publication of the paperback. But Khamenei dismissed the apology, citing the words of his predecessor: “Even if he repents and becomes the most pious Muslim on Earth, there will be no change in this divine decree.”
Unable to contact Rushdie himself, the extremists tracked down his literary collaborators. In July 1991, Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, a professor of Islamic culture, was stabbed to death at the University of Tsukuba where he worked, northeast of Tokyo. A few days earlier, the Italian translator of the book had been attacked and badly wounded in his Milan apartment by an assailant who identified himself as an Iranian, who pretended to look for a translation of the pamphlet. Two years later, the Norwegian publisher of the novel, William Nygaard, was shot and seriously injured.
In 1997, reformist Iranian President Sayyid Mohammad Khatami took office and began signaling that he would no longer actively pursue Rushdie’s fatwa or call for anyone to kill him as part of opening the way to the West and re-establishing diplomatic relations with the UK.
Rushdie expressed relief at the assurances given by the Khatami government and said he did not regret his book, even after spending ten years on the run.
“The Satanic Verses are as important to my work as any of my other books,” he said. He retracted his 1990 declaration of acceptance of Islam, admitting that he said it in order to get the fatwa repealed. When asked if he was a Muslim, he replied: “I am happy to say that I am not.”
He called his efforts to appease the extremists, reaffirming his faith and calling for the book to be withdrawn, “the biggest mistake of my life.”
He dropped his pseudonym and at least partly came out of hiding in September 2001, and has steadily increased the frequency of his public appearances.
But the threat against him did not evaporate. Despite assurances from the Khatami government, the fatwa remained in place, backed by Iran’s supreme leader. The Iranian Religious Foundation has increased the bounty on Rushdie’s head, and more than half of the members of the country’s parliament, the Majlis, have signed a statement declaring that the writer deserves to die.
Long after Khatami’s government was ousted, Khamenei remains supreme leader and has made it clear that the shadow on Rushdie’s life will not fade. As recently as 2016, 40 state-run media outlets in Iran teamed up to raise $600,000 to top up the writer’s head bounty. Abbas Salehi, then Deputy Minister of Culture and Islamic Leadership, said: “Imam Khomeini’s fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its force or disappear.”
In an interview with Agence France-Presse in Paris in 2019, Rushdie was still accompanied by armed police, but he seemed to think the world had moved on from the fatwa. “We live in a world where the subject changes very quickly. And this is a very old topic. Now there are many other things to be feared and other people to be killed,” he said.
First published in Realms of India, https://realmsofdiscordia.com/index.php/2022/08/12/tsunami-of-outrage-salman-rushdie-and-the-satanic-verses-salman-rushdie/