Ever since Viking Penguin published Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in September 1988, what is known as the Rushdie Affair has been haunting the global Muslim population.
The book sparked outrage and triggered large protests which led to street riots, deaths, and injuries. All these fuelled negative media coverage of Muslims and their religion.
According to Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi, The Satanic Verses is now manipulated for totally non-literary purposes, as many use it “to explain or to camouflage their anti-Muslim hatred, and Muslims – to denounce ‘the West’ and its plots against the Muslim world.”
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More than three decades on, the shocking attack on Salman Rushdie at Chautauqua in upstate New York on August 12, 2022 reignited issues related to the Rushdie debate.
Before Rushdie Affair
Before the Rushdie Affair, Muslims in the west, especially those in Britain, were identified mainly by their ethnicity – Asian, South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, etc.
The Rushdie Affair catapulted them into the whirlpool of media and defined them, first and foremost, by their religion. Today in the era of Islamophobia, such identification has not augured well for Muslims, especially those living in Muslim-minority countries.
In November 1988, the late Palestinian-American scholar of literature Edward Said was in Algiers to attend a Palestinian National Council (PNC) meeting. It was there that he received Rushdie’s typescript of The Satanic Verses.
He later told British writer and journalist W. J. Weatherby: “My impression was that [Rushdie] was expecting the novel to have an impact…. He said it would shake up the Muslims.”
In “Risky deconstruction: The Rushdie Affair” (1996), Michael Thorpe maintains: “One cannot doubt Rushdie offended deliberately…. Beginning with the title, The Satanic Verses is never indirect; it strikes directly at the heart of both Islam’s founder and its sacred book.”
Being a writer of Muslim background, Rushdie knew the Muslim sentiment well and could foresee the consequences of the content of his book. What is more, writer and journalist Khushwant Singh had advised Rushdie and Penguin against publishing The Satanic Verses.
However, despite such external factors and considerations, Rushdie had every right to decide whether or not to write and publish The Satanic Verses; for one thing, he received huge advance royalties for the book.
There are specific contexts that should lead a writer to self-impose limits on their freedom of expression if their work “published in London or New York” can potentially “kill people in Karachi or Bombay.” But that is a topic for another article. Here I want to focus on the Muslim response to the Rushdie Affair.
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