Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses
The 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses in Britain unleashes a firestorm of worldwide protest from Islamic fundamentalists. They assert that the hallucinatory comic fable by Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie blasphemes the Koran and the prophet Muhammad. There are violent demonstrations against the book in the world's major Islamic enclaves, including a book-burning outside London. In India and Pakistan, tens of thousands of protesters gather, and more than 20 are killed by police. Governments throughout the Muslim world ban the book.
Five months after the book's release, Iran's religious and political leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, sentences Rushdie and his associates to death, with a bounty that eventually rises to more than $5 million. Rushdie goes into hiding under British government protection and remains in fearful seclusion for six years. During this time, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, is stabbed to death and attempts are made on the life of the Italian translator and Norwegian publisher of the book. The death sentence persists, even after the Ayatollah Khomeini dies and is replaced by a less fundamentalist regime.
While in hiding, Rushdie continues to write, publishing four books of fiction, including The Moor's Last Sigh, which wins Britain's prestigious Whitbread Award for best novel of 1995. Around the world, writers, publishers, and editors come to his aid, raising money and lobbying for international pressure against Iran to lift the death sentence. In 1998, the Iranian president announces the Rushdie affair is "completely finished," although a private Muslim foundation maintains a nearly $3 million bounty. Rushdie appears in public more and more often in the mid- and late '90s, meeting with President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, even reading a "Top Ten" List on the Late Show with David Letterman in 1995. Although the edict has been lifted, Rushdie still claims he cannot live a normal life.
1988
The fifty-year-old courtesan butted in. 'Listen, those women in that harem, the men don't talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it's only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can't see.'
Especially in this town, Baal thought; above all in our Jahilia of the licentious ways, where until Mahound arrived with his rule book, the women dressed brightly, and all the talk was of fucking and money, money and sex, and not just the talk either.
He said to the youngest whore: 'Why don't you pretend for him?'
'Who?'
'Musa. If Ayesha gives him such a thrill, why not become his private and personal Ayesha?'
'God,' the girls said. 'If they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter.'"
"It was during one of these playful sessions at the end of a working day, when the girls were alone with their eunuchs and their wine, that Baal heard the youngest talking about her client, the grocer, Musa. 'That one!' she said. 'He's got a bee in his bonnet about the Prophet's wives. He's so annoyed about them that he gets excited just by mentioning their names. He tells me that I personally am the spitting image of Ayesha herself, and she's His Nibs's favourite, as all are aware. So there.'
"Return to Jahilia," in which prostitutes contemplate taking the names of the wives of Muhammad from The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, 1988, novel. Viking Press.