Satanic verses why is it controversial

It has copies on back order. In Parramatta, Collins Booksellers says "about a million people every day" are asking for copies. According to Penguin's head office in Melbourne, these should be on the shelves from early next week. Women, complete with black veils, trailed behind. Children, some in traditional dress but many sporting jeans and T-shirts, wove through the crowds. Men, fists clenched, led the shouting up front. Had the 1, or so chanting Muslims been in Mecca, no-one would have looked twice.

But through the quiet suburban streets of Arncliffe, the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini caused quite a stir. In the first public demonstration here against Salman Rushdie, the author of the controversial novel The Satanic Verses , Sydney's Islamic community supported the execution order by their leader. They also called on the Australian Government to place an immediate ban on the book, which they have declared blasphemous. Sayyed Hashim Ahmad Nassrallah, the religious leader of some , Sydney Muslims, said through an interpreter: "The Muslims in all corners of the world cannot and will not accept any slander against the prophet of Islam.

The edict or ruling which was issued by Iman Khomeini against that apostate [Rushdie] is the rule of Islam.

At 11am yesterday, the crowd gathered at Arncliffe Park carrying large portraits of the Ayatollah and posters depicting Rushdie as the devil. Children as young as 10 wore gowns saying "Death to Rushdie".

However, the Herald was stopped from talking to them. The procession, keenly watched by police, wound its way one kilometre along Wollongong Road to the Al-Zahra Mosque where the Sayyad then spoke. This view, however, clashes with the view of those for whom the Quran is the literal word of God. Rushdie now lives in the United States and makes regular public appearances. Still, 30 years later, threats against his life persist. Although mass protests have stopped, the themes and questions raised in his novel remain hotly debated.

And so it was, a quarter century or so ago, that the only emotion I felt was excitement when I ripped open the padded envelope, bearing a UK postmark, in Penguin India's modest offices in South Delhi.

The envelope contained the typescript of Rushdie's latest novel, The Satanic Verses. From the very first paragraph, featuring Rushdie's memorable protagonists, Gibreel Farishta partly modelled on the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan and Saladin Chamcha, it was apparent that the novel possessed the same astounding electricity and storytelling power that had invested his two great subcontinental novels, Midnight's Children and Shame.

It was exhilarating to think that Penguin India would soon be importing, marketing and distributing the novel throughout the subcontinent. Penguin India, the company I was publisher of at the time, had been founded only a couple of years earlier and had published barely a dozen books. The slew of great novels — The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai , A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth , The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy , and many others of distinction — that would come to define the company were yet to be published, so The Satanic Verses was not just another literary novel so far as we were concerned: it was the book that would propel us into the hearts and minds of the Indian reader.

But even as we were looking forward to putting out the novel, we received our first reality check in the form of some advice from the great Indian novelist and historian Khushwant Singh , who served as literary adviser to Penguin India. He said to me that we'd get into trouble if we published the novel, because there were passages in it that could be seized on by politicians and mullahs, taken out of context, and used to create mischief.

This was news to me, as I was, at the time, largely ignorant of the history of Islam and its sacred texts. Khushwant's words proved prophetic.

Although everyone at Penguin India, and at Penguin UK, decided that we would go ahead with publication, the decision was taken out of our hands shortly thereafter when the Indian government banned the importation of the book. The early export edition of the novel that had been shipped from the UK was pulped. The news grew progressively worse.

We received threats, and security guards were hired for the office and the homes of the executives who were most at risk. Our travails, though, were as nothing compared to the terrible things experienced by the author and the novel's translators and publishers around the world. Now, decades after I opened the envelope in my Delhi office, the circle closes, and the full story of how The Satanic Verses was born, and made its way into the world, will finally be told.

It's a tale that I am looking forward to reading. The first few months were the worst. No one knew anything. Were Iranian agents, professional killers, already in place in the UK when the fatwa was proclaimed? Might a "freelancer", stirred by a denunciation in a mosque, be an effective assassin? The media excitement was so intense that it was hard to think straight. The mobs were frightening. They burned books in the street, they bayed for blood outside parliament and waved "Rushdie must die" placards.

No one was arrested for incitement. People were fearful. The first impulse of many was to placate, to apologise on Rushdie's behalf. There was much ideological confusion. A rump of the left thought and thinks that to criticise Islamic attitudes towards apostasy was innately racist.

Sections of the right abandoned all principle and preferred ad hominem attacks; wasn't Rushdie a Muslim, after all, one of theirs? He must have known what he was doing.

He had it coming. And how much was his Special Branch protection costing? One had the impression that if it had been, say, Iris Murdoch's neck on the line there would have been less ambivalence. Either way, it seemed like the social glue of multiculturalism was melting away. We were coming apart, and doing it over a postmodern multi-layered satirical novel — one that the noisiest spirits in the debate did not intend to read for fear of being spiritually befouled.

As for Rushdie himself, his armed guard shunted him around daily between various cottages, hotels and town houses. He had disappeared, as Martin Amis noted, on to the front page. There were evenings with Salman — tense, sometimes even jovial in a dark way. But for all the expressions of personal solidarity, he was essentially alone. It was him they wanted to kill, not us. Slowly, the intelligentsia for want of a better word found its ground and rediscovered the terms of the debate around freedom of expression — terms that dissident writers in the Soviet bloc had furtively refined over the years and were openly celebrating as the Berlin Wall fell later that year.

These same terms have been used many times since, in different circumstances. In a hopeful attempt to accommodate his opponents, Rushdie spoke of his faith, or lack of it, as a God-shaped hole. His apology was firmly rebuffed by a committee of imams. He had always fought his own corner with eloquence, but now, increasingly after this rejection, he was fighting the corners of imprisoned or otherwise silenced writers around the world.

Years later this advocacy culminated in his highly effective presidency of American PEN. He has brilliantly proved the uses of adversity. The Rushdie affair was the opening chapter in a new unhappy book of modern history. The issues haven't gone away. For some of us, one lesson is that the novel as a literary form is among the highest expressions of mental freedom and must be treasured and defended. But the difficult questions remain: how does an open, pluralistic society accommodate the differing certainties of various faiths?

And how do the enthusiastically faithful accept the free-thinking of others? To the first question one might say that, generally, a secular or sceptical worldview is the best guarantor of religious freedom: tolerate and defend all within the law, favour none.

To the second — well, people who are utterly secure in their God should be above taking physical revenge when offended. Perhaps the book-burners and placard-wavers were, paradoxically, troubled by the first gremlins of doubt. I had written a novel about many things including the Anglican church.

Rushdie had written a novel about many things including the Prophet Muhammad. We were both shortlisted for the Booker prize. This was in October , almost four months before the fatwa. Even so early the accusations of blasphemy were in the air and in the publishers' mail room but the notion that the leader of Iran might pronounce a death sentence on a law-abiding British citizen was not something to foresee on that warm autumn evening, as Salman and I stood chatting outside the Guildhall, where the Booker ceremony is held.

I recall him saying, "I hope you win. He also said, "I couldn't win if I wrote Ulysses. I remember the novelist and screenwriter Nigel Williams had temporarily abandoned his ice-cream suit for more formal wear. Was he on duty for the BBC? He joined us with the news that a very suspicious individual had just been prevented entering the Guildhall.

The would-be trespasser had claimed to be a reporter, although one without credentials. He had said his name was Salaman. Williams said, "The assassin always takes his victim's name.

I completely underestimated just how significant it was. I recall two particular moments in that long, dull, tense evening, when I did not know what a fatwa was. I was seated at the Faber table. Faber's then chairman, Matthew Evans, produced his camera. Later, when the chair Michael Foot read out the shortlist I observed a well-known critic, a friend of Salman's, mime the most tremendous explosion.

It was not at all malicious, just hysterical. In my recollection of that night, the Guildhall contains an almost flammable hysteria, which has always precluded an honest answer to the simple question about what it is like to win the Booker prize. The world The Satanic Verses fell into in is strangely difficult to recapture. Religion was largely a matter of private conscience, not that blunt and noisy instrument in the public sphere it subsequently once more became.

After establishing himself as a journalist, he decided to find out and help others understand why the book had such a lasting impact on his community. Skip to header Skip to main content Skip to footer. In Review. Why is the novel so controversial? How are the row still relevant today?