Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses was published by Viking Penguin in London on September 26, 1988. Salman Rushdie, a British-Indian novelist born in Bombay in 1947, tells of two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, who survive the bombing of a hijacked airliner and fall into the English Channel. They are transformed, with Gibreel becoming an angel and Saladin a devil. Gibreel's dreams contain a fictional version of the beginnings of Islam in Mecca, with a prophet named Mahound.¹

The title refers to a story recorded by early Muslim historians such as al-Tabari that the Prophet Muhammad briefly accepted verses acknowledging three Meccan goddesses, then withdrew them as inspired by Satan; most Muslim scholars today reject the story. Rushdie, who had won the Booker Prize for Midnight's Children in 1981, wrote the book about migration, faith and the self. The Satanic Verses was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988.¹²

Many Muslims found its depiction of the prophet and his wives offensive and blasphemous. India banned its import in October 1988, followed by other countries, and a copy was burned at a protest in Bradford, England, in January 1989. On February 14, 1989, Iran's leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the author's death. The book is now widely read and studied as a work of fiction and a case in debates on free speech, religion and censorship.²³