Other Muslim leaders echoed his call and soon there was a chorus of voices complaining about the so-called insult to Muslim religious feelings. When I pressed them on this, they said they did not need to read it. If Khushwant Singh believed it was offensive to Muslims well then, the opinion of this great man of letters was more than enough for them.
I guess Khushwant Singh should have issued a statement to the effect that as a liberal he did not believe in the banning of books. But, as far as I can recall, he did no such thing. The protests snowballed. Violence was threatened. The matter was referred to the Home Minister.
Buta Singh, one of the great intellectuals of our time, if I remember, correctly. The Home Ministry recommended that the book should not be published because its distribution would lead to violence. The government of India accepted this recommendation and banned the import of The Satanic Verses. Later, when I interviewed Rajiv Gandhi, who was then Prime Minister, about this decision, he took the line common to all Indian politicians through the ages that nothing must be allowed to cause riots and endanger communal harmony.
I can see the merit in the argument but I think he was wrong: banning books is a slippery slope. Tempers ran so high that no Muslim politicians dared speak up against the ban.
Mushirul Hasan said that while he found the novel offensive, he did not believe in banning books and was beaten up by his students. The protests spread to Pakistan. A mob attacked the British Council building.
Ayatollah Khomeini saw the protest on TV and asked what it was about. He was told it was about a book that attacked the Prophet which The Satanic Verses emphatically did not and declared, in his magisterial way, that well, in that case, they should put the author to death. And so the famous fatwa was issued and Salman Rushdie went into hiding, a phase he describes in his memoir Joseph Anton.
Well, first of all: people - and politicians and clerics in particular - are ignorant. Few, if any, of those who protested had even read the book. They were not offended.
They were looking for offence. This had some comical consequences, The Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid, who supported the ban, is supposed to have said that he was not surprised that Salman had written such a book. He knew all about him.
He had been corrupted by a Western education. So what if his father was a minister? The magistrate refused, so the prosecutor appealed to the High Court, where 13 Muslim barristers attempted to get the book banned, but their action forced them to draft an indictment against Rushdie and his publishers specifying with legal precision the way in which the novel had blasphemed. Their efforts convinced me that The Satanic Verses is not blasphemous.
The book is the fictional story of two men, infused with Islam but confused by the temptations of the west. The first survives by returning to his roots. The other, Gibreel, poleaxed by his spiritual need to believe in God and his intellectual inability to return to the faith, finally kills himself. The plot, in short, is not an advertisement for apostasy. Our opponents could in the end only allege six blasphemies in the book, and each one was based either on a misreading or on theological error:.
God is described in the book as "The Destroyer of Man". As He is similarly described in the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation, especially of men who are unbelievers or enemies of the Jews. The book contains criticisms of the prophet Abraham for his conduct towards Hagar and Ismael, their son.
Abraham deserves criticism and is not seen as without fault in Islamic, Christian or Jewish traditions. Rushdie refers to Muhammad as "Mahoud". He called him variously "a conjuror", "a magician" and a "false prophet". Rushdie does nothing of the sort. These descriptions come from the mouth of a drunken apostate, a character with whom neither author nor reader has sympathy. The book grossly insults the wives of the Prophet by having whores use their names. This is the point.
The wives are expressly said to be chaste, and the adoption of their names by whores in a brothel symbolises the perversion and decadence into which the city had fallen before it surrendered to Islam. The book vilifies the close companions of the Prophet, calling them "bums from Persia" and "clowns", whereas the Qur'an treats them as men of righteousness. These phrases are used by a depraved hack poet, hired to pen propaganda against the Prophet. They do not represent the author's beliefs.
The book criticises the teachings of Islam for containing too many rules and seeking to control every aspect of everyday life. Characters in the book do make such criticisms, but they cannot amount to blasphemy because they do not vilify God or the Prophet. The case had one very satisfying result: the Home Office announced it would not allow further blasphemy prosecutions, declaring "how inappropriate our legal mechanisms are for dealing with matters of faith and individual belief … the strength of their own belief is the best armour against mockers and blasphemers".
Amen to that Pussy Riot prosecutors please note. The crime of blasphemy has now been abolished, although this wretched legacy of English law still permits courtroom persecutions in Pakistan and some other countries of the Commonwealth. Although Rushdie remains alive and well after nearly 24 years, spare a thought for the families of those who did not get away from this theocratic regime: the democrats and dissidents assassinated in Europe; the thousands of atheist and Marxist prisoners murdered in prison; the green movement protesters and their lawyers 15 so far who have been sentenced to long prison terms for being their lawyers.
Had the world devised a way to bring this regime to justice for devising the Rushdie fatwa, we would not now have to worry about what it will do with nuclear weapons. You cannot be fearful or anxious when you have no idea about what's hurtling out of the future towards you.
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.
The resulting anger led to bookshop bombings, burnings and bans on the novel in much of the Islamic world. Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, even issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie - forcing the writer to go into hiding for almost a decade. The controversy surrounding the novel also sparked a cultural war in Britain between those who considered the book blasphemous and called for it to be banned, and those who defended it as an expression of freedom of speech, says the i news site.
The most important questions posed by Azhar in the documentary surround free or limited speech, says The Guardian. Rushdie and his supporters see free expression as an undeniable right. Indeed, during filming of the new documentary, a man in Bradford snatched a copy of the novel from Azhar and tried to set it on fire - an incident that highlights the continuing relevance of the controversy, says the Bafta-winning filmmaker.
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.
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