I was a child, and a long way from becoming Muslim, when the Rushdie affair happened. My mother was in college going through teacher training, and one of her college friends had a sister who was married to a Tunisian and lived there. She told us one time that the sister had bought a copy of The Satanic Verses and taken it to Tunisia and found that nobody had ever heard of it. The impression that she seems to have taken from that was that the book caused no great stir in an actual Muslim country, and was therefore a storm in a teacup. The real reason nobody had heard of the book there was because Tunisia was a dictatorship; it was not long after Ben Ali had taken over from Habib Bourguiba and despite some superficial reforms, he had no intention of allowing democracy or freedom of speech. (The country also had stronger relations with France than with the UK and the main European language used was French, which may also have made the affair more obscure.) The media was censored and as it was the late 1980s, there was no Internet and no al-Jazeera either.
At college, I got hold of a book called Distorted Imagination by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, about the Rushdie affair, the literary tropes and stereotypes of Asia and Muslims used in that book and others by Rushdie and the hysterical and bigoted response to the affair among London literary types. (One of Sardar’s other books, Introducing Muhammad, was influential in my becoming Muslim.) The authors tear into a number of pro-Iranian figures in London at the time, such as Yaqub Zaki who worked for the Muslim Institute, an Iranian foundation, and Kalim Siddiqui of the Muslim Parliament. Later on, when that organisation under later leadership took a more modernist and moderate direction, both authors had articles published on their website, but at the time it was a firmly pro-Iranian organisation. He noted that while some Muslims were offended by the book, others dismissed it as the witterings of a “self-hating Indo-Anglian” in the words of a review in Trends magazine which encouraged Muslims to leave him to his self-regarding literary circle.
The Muslims who were offended were (mostly) not seeking the death of Rushdie. There was a blasphemy law on the statute book at the time and Muslims wanted it extended to cover Islam as well as Christianity. This was not the direction of travel in wider society; that was towards abolishing the law altogether. It was Khomeini, the leader of Iran, who issued the call to kill Rushdie and whose regime was behind the attacks on translators and publishers in various countries. At the time Khomeini served as an inspiration to a certain type of Islamic political revivalist and to them, the fact that he was a Shi’ite did not matter; he was a Muslim who had led an “Islamic revolution” and some saw him as the actual leader of the Muslims. Few Muslims are under any such illusion now; groups which regarded Shi’ites as unbelievers gained a lot more traction in the 90s onwards and nowadays the Iranian regime’s role in propping up the Assad regime has turned a lot of Muslims against it, even those who disagree with that view about Shi’ites. People who were active in the campaign against this book went on to form UKACIA (UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs) and later the Muslim Council of Britain.
But although “the fatwa” did gain a certain amount of support from some Muslims around the world for a while, it was about Khomeini asserting his authority. While there is still a certain amount of admiration for Iran for maintaining its independence in a part of the world dominated by US air bases, that authority has melted away considerably in the years since and the regime has tried to build bridges with the western world, so while the fatwa is no longer policy, various organisations in Iran still maintain a bounty on Rushdie’s head that recently increased to over $3m. So when someone finally did try to kill Rushdie, it amazed a lot of people that the suspect is in his early 20s and was not born when the book was published. Someone I follow on Twitter said she thought the Rushdie matter was a “Generation X beef”. Clearly, someone could still get worked up enough about it just by reading about it, though, I suspect, not the book itself.
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