Why Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ remains so controversial decades after its publication
Author Salman Rushdie is in the hospital with serious injuries after being stabbed by a man at an arts festival in New York State on Aug. 12, 2022. The following article was published in 2018 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.
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.