This happened about the same time that the communist bookstore owner who also had a booth on the 'free speech' plaza told me, quite straightforwardly and without irony, that of course under a Marxist regime, dissenters wouldn't be allowed to speak out against Marxism, because that would make you an enemy of the people. Their 'position' was a long, equivocal set of semi-justifications that veered away from actively supporting or condemning the Ayatollah, but as best as I could understand it, it boiled down to: 'We don't really approve of calling for people to be killed, but shame on Salman Rushdie for offending Muslims - he should have known better.' So one bright spring day, as I wandered along the student plaza where various organizations and clubs and pamphleteers and screaming lunatics were lined up for their daily assault on the attention of passing students, I saw that the Muslim Students Association had a booth set up, in which there was a lengthy banner explaining the 'Muslim reaction' to the Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie.Ĭurious (I had heard of the fatwa, of course, but not read the book), I walked over and read their wall of text, and then talked to a couple of the Muslim students for a while. The Ayatollah Khomeini was still the Great Muslim Bugbear of the West ‐ the Iranian hostage crisis was still, if not fresh, not yet faded into history, and Saddam Hussein was our buddy because he was killing Iranians. In 1989, I was a college student (there, I've really dated myself now) at a university rather well known for free speech and liberalism.

I only read it this year, but I recall the controversy vividly.Ī short digression about young Inverarity's college years That made this book far more famous than it otherwise would have been, though Rushdie was already a big-name author. The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, and the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's head in 1989. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil.

Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's best-known and most galvanizing book.

The satanic verses by salman rushdie