Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, became the centre of one of the most consequential disputes over religion, literature and freedom of expression in the modern era. Some Muslims considered passages in the novel deeply offensive and blasphemous, while Rushdie and his defenders argued that a novelist’s right to publish fiction should not depend on whether religious communities approve of its contents. The dispute escalated from protests and book bans to threats against Rushdie and others involved with the book.
The controversy reached an international turning point on 14 February 1989, when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a religious decree calling for Rushdie’s death and urging Muslims to kill him and people involved in publishing the book. Rushdie subsequently lived under police protection for years. The affair also exposed a difficult question that remains relevant today: how should societies balance freedom of expression with religious belief, offence and communal peace?
What is The Satanic Verses?
The Satanic Verses is a novel by British-Indian author Salman Rushdie.
Published in Britain by Viking Penguin on 26 September 1988, it is a work of fiction that combines dreams, migration, identity, religion and cultural conflict. Its treatment of Islamic history and religious figures became the central source of controversy.
The title refers to a disputed tradition concerning alleged verses associated with the Prophet Muhammad and three pre-Islamic Arabian goddesses.
Rushdie’s novel uses fictionalised versions of religious and historical material. Some Muslim readers regarded the treatment of the Prophet, the Qur’an and other Islamic subjects as offensive and blasphemous.
It is important to distinguish between the novel’s fictional narrative and historical claims about Islam. Rushdie was writing literature rather than producing an Islamic theological text.
Why did some Muslims object to the book?
The controversy was not caused by one isolated passage.
Critics objected to the novel’s treatment of several Islamic themes and figures, including its fictional representations of the Prophet Muhammad, his wives and the origins of the Qur’anic revelation.
Academic discussion of the controversy has also emphasised the novel’s use of satire, irreverence and literary representations that some Muslims regarded as degrading Islam.
For many opponents, therefore, the issue was not simply that the book contained an unpopular opinion. They regarded parts of it as an attack on sacred religious figures and beliefs.
That distinction helps explain the intensity of the response.
When did the controversy begin?
The controversy began soon after publication in 1988.
Muslim organisations and individuals in Britain and elsewhere protested against the book. Some governments subsequently prohibited its import or publication.
The British government, however, did not ban the novel.
This became an important part of the wider British debate because existing British blasphemy law was historically concerned with Christianity rather than Islam. A House of Lords committee concluded in 1989 that the existing laws did not provide a route for prosecuting alleged blasphemy against Islam.
The government also stated that it had no power simply to ban the book under the circumstances being discussed in Parliament.
The Bradford book burning
One of the most visible British protests took place in Bradford in January 1989, when demonstrators publicly burned copies of The Satanic Verses.
The incident became an enduring symbol of the cultural conflict surrounding the novel.
For opponents of the book, the demonstration expressed profound religious outrage.
For many defenders of freedom of expression, burning the book illustrated the dangers of suppressing literature because it offended a religious community.
The disagreement therefore involved two competing principles: protection of religious sensibilities and protection of freedom of expression.
What happened in Pakistan?
The controversy also produced major demonstrations in Pakistan.
On 12 February 1989, thousands of people demonstrated against Rushdie and the book in Islamabad. The protest became violent, with deaths and injuries reported after demonstrators attempted to reach the U.S. cultural centre.
Pakistan subsequently became one of several countries where The Satanic Verses was banned.
The events were taking place before Khomeini issued his decree against Rushdie.
That chronology matters because the controversy had already become international before the Iranian intervention transformed it into a much broader security and diplomatic crisis.
What was Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa?
On 14 February 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the declaration that made the Rushdie affair globally famous.
Khomeini called for Rushdie’s death and extended the threat to people involved in publishing the book who were aware of its contents.
The declaration is commonly described as a fatwa, although the word has a broader meaning in Islamic jurisprudence.
A fatwa is generally a religious-legal opinion issued by an Islamic legal authority in response to a question. It is not automatically equivalent to a universally binding court judgment or death sentence. The Rushdie case became an unusually prominent and controversial example because Khomeini used the declaration to call for Rushdie’s killing.
Why did the fatwa change the controversy?
Before February 1989, The Satanic Verses controversy largely centred on censorship, religious offence and public protest.
After Khomeini’s declaration, Rushdie’s personal safety became a central issue.
British authorities placed him under police protection. The case also created serious diplomatic tensions between Britain and Iran. Parliament recorded that the British government regarded Khomeini’s statement as incompatible with international obligations and the rule of law.
The controversy had therefore moved beyond literary criticism.
It had become an international dispute involving religion, state power, diplomatic relations, security and freedom of expression.
Did Rushdie apologise?
Rushdie later issued a statement expressing regret for the distress his novel had caused Muslims.
The gesture did not resolve the dispute.
According to a 1990 parliamentary account, Rushdie’s statement expressed “profound regret” that the book had distressed Muslims, but the apology was not accepted in Iran and the threat remained.
This episode demonstrated another fundamental problem: an apology for causing offence does not necessarily resolve a dispute when the underlying disagreement concerns whether the work should have been published at all.
What happened to Rushdie during the years of the fatwa?
Rushdie spent much of the following decade under substantial security precautions.
His movements were restricted, and the threat affected people associated with the book.
The controversy also had consequences beyond Rushdie himself. Translators and publishers became targets, and violent incidents were associated with attempts to enforce opposition to the novel.
The affair consequently became a major international reference point in debates about literary freedom.
Did people involved with the book face violence?
Yes.
The threat did not remain purely rhetorical.
The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was murdered in 1991. The Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, survived a stabbing that same year.
Rushdie himself was eventually attacked in August 2022, when a man stabbed him repeatedly before a planned speaking engagement in New York state. Rushdie survived but suffered serious injuries. The attack occurred more than three decades after Khomeini’s 1989 declaration.
The 2022 attack demonstrated that the controversy surrounding Rushdie had not become merely a historical footnote.
How did Britain respond?
The British government’s position centred heavily on protecting Rushdie while maintaining the principle that the publication of a controversial book was not itself grounds for state censorship.
Parliamentary debates from the period show how sharply divided opinion was.
Some MPs argued that the book had caused serious offence and raised questions about the limits of expression in a multicultural society. At the same time, Parliament condemned threats against Rushdie and violence associated with protests.
The controversy therefore became part of a larger British discussion about how a diverse society should reconcile freedom of expression with religious pluralism.
What happened to Britain’s blasphemy laws?
The Rushdie affair contributed to a wider debate over whether Britain’s historic blasphemy laws were appropriate for a multi-faith society.
At the time, the relevant common-law offences were primarily concerned with Christianity.
The UK Parliament eventually abolished the common-law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in 2008 as part of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act.
The change meant that Britain’s criminal law no longer treated blasphemy against Christianity as a distinct common-law offence.
That does not mean that every form of expression about religion is legally unrestricted. Other laws can apply to threats, harassment, incitement and other unlawful conduct.
How did the controversy affect Muslims in Britain?
The Rushdie affair had a significant effect on Britain’s Muslim public life.
It helped produce large-scale political mobilisation among British Muslims around questions of religious identity, representation and the treatment of Islam in public culture.
A UK government report on contemporary anti-blasphemy activism describes the Rushdie protests as an important starting point for later forms of organised Islamic anti-blasphemy activism in Britain.
But British Muslims did not hold a single view.
Responses ranged from demands for censorship and condemnation of Rushdie to opposition to violence and support for freedom of expression.
Treating “Muslims” as a single political or religious bloc therefore obscures the diversity of responses to the affair.
Why did the controversy become a free-speech issue?
Supporters of Rushdie’s right to publish argued that fiction and artistic expression should not be subject to a religious veto.
Their argument was not necessarily that nobody had a right to be offended.
Rather, it was that offence alone should not determine whether a lawful work can be published.
This became especially significant in Britain because the controversy occurred within a constitutional system that placed substantial value on freedom of expression while also maintaining laws against certain forms of harmful conduct.
The Rushdie affair consequently became a recurring example in debates about where the boundaries of free expression should lie.
Does freedom of expression mean people cannot object to a book?
No.
People have the right to criticise, boycott or protest against a book, subject to the law.
The distinction becomes important when protest crosses into threats, violence or coercion.
A person can argue that The Satanic Verses is offensive or blasphemous. Another person can argue that it should be published. Both positions can be expressed within a debate about freedom and religion.
Threatening to kill an author is fundamentally different from criticising the author’s work.
Why is the Rushdie affair still discussed today?
The controversy established a set of questions that continue to appear whenever religious belief and freedom of expression collide:
- Should religious beliefs receive special protection from criticism?
- When does criticism become unlawful incitement or harassment?
- How should governments respond to threats against writers?
- Can religious communities protest offensive material without restricting artistic freedom?
- How should minority religious communities participate in public debate?
- Where should institutions draw the line between interfaith sensitivity and protection of free expression?
There are no simple answers to all of these questions.
The legal framework also differs between countries, making the Rushdie affair relevant to discussions about freedom of expression well beyond Britain.
The Rushdie controversy and Tahir Ashrafi’s 2007 comments
The history has a direct connection to the recent controversy involving Pakistani cleric Tahir Ashrafi.
In 2007, after Britain announced that Rushdie would receive a knighthood, Ashrafi publicly criticised the decision and made remarks invoking Osama bin Laden. Those comments resurfaced decades later and became central to the decision to withdraw Ashrafi’s Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation.
That connection is important because the Rushdie affair sits at the intersection of religious offence, political protest, extremist violence and interfaith relations.
It also explains why references to Rushdie and bin Laden can carry very different historical meanings from an ordinary disagreement about a novel.
The 1988–89 controversy was not simply a dispute over whether a book was offensive. It became a landmark confrontation involving a novelist’s personal safety, religious identity, state power and freedom of expression.
What the Satanic Verses controversy ultimately changed
The Rushdie affair permanently changed the way many governments, publishers, writers and religious organisations approached the relationship between literature and religious offence.
It demonstrated that a work of fiction could become an international political issue and that disputes over religious representation could have consequences far beyond the literary world.
It also exposed tensions within multicultural societies that remain unresolved: how can people defend the right to criticise religion while also recognising that religious beliefs and symbols can be profoundly important to millions of people?
More than three decades later, the most enduring lesson of the Rushdie affair is not that one side simply won that argument. It is that **religious tolerance, freedom of expression and protection from violence are distinct principles that can come into tension—and understanding their differences is essential to discussing controversies such as The Satanic Verses without reducing them to a simple conflict between religion and free speech.**