The writer had no idea his novel would unleash such anger and become a litmus test of freedom of expression
wrote his novel The Satanic Verses in September 1988, he thought its many references to Islam might cause some ripples.
By October 1988, he already needed a bodyguard in the face of a deluge of death threats, cancelling trips and hunkering down. One Muslim-majority country after another banned the book, and in December thousands of Muslims demonstrated in Bolton, Greater Manchester, and burned a pile of the books. In Islamabad, six people were killed in a mob attack on the US cultural centre in the Pakistani capital to protest against the book. There were riots in Srinagar and Kashmir.
Bookshops in the UK and US soon found themselves having to urgently decide where they stood on that matter, in the face of a wave of firebombings of stores that continued to sell it. Unable to reach Rushdie himself, extremists sought out his literary collaborators. In July 1991 the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, a professor of Islamic culture, was knifed to death at Tsukuba University where he worked, north-east of Tokyo. A few days earlier, the book’s Italian translator was attacked and badly wounded at his Milan apartment by an attacker who had identified himself as an Iranian, pretending to seek translation of a pamphlet.
He has called his effort to appease extremists by affirming his faith and calling for the withdrawal of the book the “biggest mistake of my life”.
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