I remember reading about the fatwa (Islamic legal opinion; in this case, a death sentence) levied against Salman Rushdie when his fourth book, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 in Britain.
For a novel? I thought. It was shocking. (In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t read it; even then I was pretty good at assessing which books were for me, and I didn’t believe that one was.)
Twenty-five years have passed. Rushdie is still writing award-winning literary fiction. And recently Vanity Fair published an in-depth article (“A Fundamental Fight”) about the events of that time.
There are plenty of moments from 1989 when the world changed: the meeting of man and tank in Tiananmen Square, the release of the dissident Czech playwright Václav Havel, the unbricking of the wall in Berlin. But nothing shook the world of belles lettres like the moment when an Islamic dictator said an Anglo-Indian deserved to die for writing a novel. “When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes,” Rushdie has written, and the ordeal of The Satanic Verses presaged the ways the world would change. The big themes of the past quarter-century were previewed there: the rise of Islamist fanaticism; the inequities that sparked a growing rage toward Western values; the impact of media in a global epoch.
It’s quite a story. People did die for this book:
Bombs exploded in Cody’s bookstore, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and half a dozen bookshops in the U.K. The novel’s Japanese translator was shot and killed, its Italian translator stabbed, its Turkish translator attacked. Its Norwegian publisher was shot and left for dead. (He survived.) Two clerics who spoke out against the fatwa—one Saudi, one Tunisian—were shot and killed in Brussels.
Under great pressure to withdraw the book, the publishing house (Penguin) stood by Rushdie, although the then-publisher, Peter Mayer, was forced to withdraw his young daughter from her private school; officials thought a death squad might arrive at the school and shoot the wrong student. (Yes, that’s what they said.) Although more than sixty people died in the controversy, none were Penguin employees.
Rushdie’s friends in the publishing community stuck by him, too, shuffling him from this one’s country cottage to that one’s apartment in the city, defending him in the press and, on one notable occasion, to Prince Charles. The ordeal changed them as well.
This is a strong story about the publishing industry, friendship, and the power of fiction to move people—in both positive and negative ways. There’s lots more here; prepare to be moved and surprised.
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