Thirty years on, why ‘The Satanic Verses’ remains so controversial | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
The book, “Satanic Verses,” goes to the heart of Muslim religious beliefs when Rushdie, in dream sequences, challenges and sometimes seems to mock some of its most sensitive tenets
Author Salman Rushdie is in hospital with serious injuries after being stabbed by a man at an arts festival in New York state on Friday. The following article was published on the 30th anniversary of the release of ‘The Satanic Verses’.
One of the most controversial books in recent literary history, Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses,” was published three decades ago this month and almost immediately set off angry demonstrations all over the world, some of them violent.
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A year later, in 1989, Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, ordering Muslims to kill the author. Born in India to a Muslim family, but by then a British citizen living in the U.K., Rushdie was forced to go into protective hiding for the greater part of a decade.
What was – and still is – behind this outrage?
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