The Satanic Verses — The Book That Started a 36-Year Fatwa
A deep-dive into Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses — the 1988 novel that triggered bans in 13 countries, a death fatwa never formally revoked, the murders of translators across four continents, and the 2022 stabbing that put Rushdie on a ventilator. Connects to 22,810 US book ban instances since 2021. Closes with a frank worth-reading verdict.
On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie walked onto a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York — a liberal arts retreat of the kind that hosted lectures on gardening and constitutional law. He was about to give a talk on the United States as a refuge for writers living under threat. A man rushed the stage and stabbed him approximately fifteen times. 1 Rushdie was airlifted to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, placed on a ventilator, and hospitalized for six weeks. He permanently lost sight in his right eye, sustained liver damage, and lost the use of nerves in one hand. 1 At trial, he described the moment he realized what was happening: "a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes." 1
His attacker, Hadi Matar — a 24-year-old Lebanese-American from Fairview, New Jersey — was convicted of second-degree attempted murder in February 2025, after less than two hours of jury deliberation. 1 On May 16, 2025, Judge David Foley sentenced Matar to twenty-five years — the maximum — plus a concurrent seven years for wounding the event's moderator, Henry Reese. 1 Matar also faces separate federal terrorism charges for allegedly providing material support to Hezbollah. 1
The attack was not spontaneous. Matar's now-deleted Facebook profile contained photographs of Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Qasem Soleimani (the Iranian general killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2020). 2 He carried a fake New Jersey driver's license using the alias "Hassan Mughniyah" — an apparent compound of Hassan Nasrallah (the Hezbollah leader) and Imad Mughniyah (the Hezbollah military commander). 2 Matar admitted to the New York Post that he had read only about two pages of The Satanic Verses. He said he disliked Rushdie because the author had "attacked Islam." 2 The book he had barely read was published thirty-four years before he picked up the knife.
The thread connecting the knife to the novel runs through one document: a religious ruling broadcast on Iranian radio on February 14, 1989, when Rushdie was forty-one years old and had just become famous.
What kind of novel is this?
Before getting to the fires and the death sentence, the book itself deserves a fair hearing — because one of the stranger facts of the entire affair is that most people who formed passionate opinions about The Satanic Verses had not read it.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on June 19, 1947, two months before Indian independence and the Partition that split the subcontinent. 3 He was educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge, where he read History. He briefly worked as an advertising copywriter in London — reportedly coining the slogan "naughty but nice" for a cream cake campaign — before his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize and put him on the map. 3 The Satanic Verses was his fourth book.
Published by Viking Penguin on September 26, 1988 in the United Kingdom, the novel opens with two men falling from an exploded airplane over the English Channel. 4 Gibreel Farishta is a Bollywood superstar; Saladin Chamcha is an Anglophile voice-over artist — one of those immigrants who has swallowed England whole. Both survive. And both begin to transform: Gibreel into a version of the angel Gabriel (Jibreel in Arabic), Chamcha into something demonic. Their metamorphosis is the novel's central conceit. 3
Woven into this frame are three extended dream sequences that Gibreel experiences as he descends into psychosis: a fictionalized account of Muhammad's early revelations, a story about an Indian village girl who leads a suicidal pilgrimage to Mecca, and a portrait of a fanatical imam in exile — transparently modeled on Khomeini's years in Paris before the 1979 revolution. 3 The dreams are explicitly presented as the hallucinations of a character in breakdown.
Harold Bloom called it "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement." 3 The scholar Timothy Brennan described it as "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain." 3 It won the 1988 Whitbread Award for Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, which that year went to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. 3 Literary influences include Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which Rushdie has cited as the direct inspiration — a novel that likewise uses a devil-figure to satirize a conformist society. 3
Rushdie's own summary of what he intended: "the book isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay." 5 Whether that framing is convincing — or whether it understates the text's confrontational energy — is something readers should judge for themselves. The controversy did not erupt because people misread a gentle novel.
Why it caused outrage: the offending passages
Several elements of the text struck Muslim readers as deliberate insults to the Prophet and to Islamic tradition.
The title itself refers to an episode known in Islamic scholarship as the gharaniq ("cranes") story: the idea that the Prophet Muhammad, under pressure from Meccan opponents, briefly endorsed verses acknowledging three pagan goddesses, then retracted them as satanic deception. The story's authenticity is rejected by mainstream Islamic scholarship and is absent from the six canonical hadith collections. By making it the novel's organizing metaphor, Rushdie was reaching for one of the most theologically explosive threads in Islamic history. 4
In the dream sequences, Muhammad appears under the name "Mahound" — a derogatory term used by medieval European Christians to describe the Prophet as a demon. The holy city of Mecca becomes "Jahilia" — from jahiliyyah, meaning the pre-Islamic "age of ignorance." A brothel in the city is called "The Curtain" (Hijab), and its twelve prostitutes take the names of Muhammad's wives, who are honored in Islam as "Mothers of the Believers." 4 A scribe character named Salman the Persian alters the Prophet's Quranic dictation without being detected — a reference to a historical story about a companion who left Islam after doing exactly this. 4
Rushdie's literary defense — that all these elements occur in the hallucinations of a psychotic character, not as the author's assertions — was legally articulated by Geoffrey Robertson QC, who argued that the offensive remarks are made by "a drunken apostate, a character with whom neither reader nor author has any sympathy." 4 The scholar Daniel Pipes observed that many British reviewers missed the Islamic resonances entirely because Rushdie used fictional proxies — "Mahound" instead of "Muhammad" — meaning the blasphemy landed differently depending on what the reader already knew. 4
The literary defense, however, carries a cost: it requires accepting that a serious satirical novel about revelation, prophecy, and religious authority bears no relationship to the actual religion it is clearly invoking. Many readers — including thoughtful ones who did not endorse a death sentence — found that argument hard to accept.
The ban cascade: 13 countries in nine months
India moved first. On October 5, 1988 — just nine days after the UK publication — the Rajiv Gandhi government imposed an import ban, citing potential threats to public order. 4 Indian Member of Parliament Syed Shahabuddin, who led calls for the ban, had not read the book. His reasoning: "I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is." 6
In November 1988, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, and Pakistan banned the book. Sri Lanka followed in December. By March 1989, Malaysia, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore had all imposed bans. Brunei banned it later that year; Venezuela became the last country to act, in June 1989. 4 In under a year, approximately thirteen governments had banned a single novel.
In the United Kingdom, protests preceded the international cascade. On December 2, 1988, seven thousand Muslims in Bolton marched from a mosque to the town center and burned a copy. 4 On January 14, 1989, approximately one thousand protesters marched through Bradford and repeated the gesture — an image that circulated around the world and would be remembered as the opening act of a global crisis. The Bradford protests were organized by Shabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge philosophy graduate who later published Be Careful with Muhammad! (1989), arguing that the liberal free-speech framework was incapable of accounting for the lived harm of religious insult.
Then, on February 14, 1989 — one day after a protest in Islamabad turned violent and killed six people — Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued what became the most famous fatwa of the twentieth century:
"I am informing all brave Muslims of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses, a text written, edited, and published against Islam, the Prophet of Islam, and the Qur'an, along with all the editors and publishers aware of its contents, are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay, so that no one will dare insult the sacred beliefs of Muslims henceforth." 7
An Iranian religious foundation offered a bounty of one million dollars for Rushdie's death — three million if an Iranian carried out the killing. 2
The United Kingdom broke diplomatic relations with Iran on March 7, 1989. 4 All twelve member states of the European Economic Community withdrew their ambassadors from Tehran for three weeks — an extraordinary collective expression of protest. 4 A death sentence issued from Tehran had become a rupture in international order.
In November 2024, India's Delhi High Court effectively lifted the country's thirty-six-year import ban — after government departments failed to produce the original 1988 customs notification. The court declared it had no option but to "presume" the ban order never legally existed. 8 Lawyers disagreed about whether this meant the book could now freely enter the country; no Indian publisher has yet issued a domestic edition.
The human cost: translators, publishers, fifty deaths
Rushdie himself was placed under round-the-clock British police protection and spent approximately nine years in hiding. 4 He was forced to move fifty-six times in the first five months. 6 He took the alias "Joseph Anton" — from Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, the two authors whose company he chose for his exile identity. 6 He documented the experience in a 636-page memoir, Joseph Anton, published in 2012.
The violence was not abstract. On July 3, 1991, Ettore Capriolo — the Italian translator of The Satanic Verses — was stabbed at his apartment in Milan by a man who had knocked on his door posing as an Iranian seeking translation work. Capriolo survived, critically wounded. 4 Ten days later, on July 13, 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi — the Japanese translator, a professor of Islamic culture at Tsukuba University — was stabbed to death in his campus office. His murder has never been solved. 4 On October 11, 1993, William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher of the novel, was shot three times in the back outside his Oslo home. He survived after months of hospitalization; Norwegian police later charged that the attack was connected to the book, but the assailants were never caught. 4
On July 2, 1993, a mob in Sivas, Turkey set fire to the Madimak Hotel — targeting Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator who was staying there. Nesin escaped because the mob failed to recognize him. Thirty-seven other people, mostly Alevi intellectuals attending a cultural festival, died in the fire. 4
Cody's Books in Berkeley, California — one of America's landmark independent bookstores — was firebombed for carrying the novel. Staff voted unanimously to keep selling it. The store's owner, Andy Ross, later wrote: "It was the defining moment in my 35 years of bookselling. It was also the moment when I realized bookselling was a dangerous and subversive vocation; because, after all, ideas are powerful weapons." 6
Approximately fifty people died in violence connected to the publication of The Satanic Verses. 6 None of them wrote the book.
The fatwa's afterlife: never formally revoked
Khomeini died in June 1989, four months after issuing the fatwa. Under Shia jurisprudence, a fatwa issued by a marja' (a leading religious authority) survives its issuer unless formally revoked by another living marja'. No one revoked it.
In September 1998, reformist President Mohammad Khatami declared the affair "completely finished." His foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, stated that the government "disassociates itself from any reward which has been offered in this regard and does not support it." 9 Rushdie began to emerge from hiding. Diplomatic relations between Britain and Iran were restored. It looked, for a moment, like the affair had passed into history.
It had not. In 2017, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei — who had succeeded Khomeini — stated flatly: "The decree is as Imam Khomeini issued." 2 In February 2016, over three dozen Iranian state-run media outlets pooled their resources to add $600,000 to an existing bounty of approximately $2.8 million, bringing the total reward for Rushdie's death to nearly $4 million. 10 Abbas Salehi, Iran's deputy culture minister at the time, explained: "Imam Khomeini's fatwa is a religious decree and it will never lose its power or fade out." 9
On August 7, 2022 — five days before the Chautauqua stabbing — a state-controlled Iranian website republished the original fatwa, describing it as "a great and unforgettable fatwa for the Muslims of the world" and stating that Rushdie "is left with the nightmare of death that will never leave him." 2 Five days later, Hadi Matar crossed a parking lot and climbed onto a stage.
FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that Matar "attempted to carry out a fatwa endorsed by Hezbollah that called for the death of Salman Rushdie — a fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini." 1 Matar's federal terrorism trial — for allegedly providing material support to a designated terrorist organization — has yet to be scheduled.
The debate that never resolved
The Rushdie affair split writers, politicians, and public intellectuals in ways that still feel uncomfortable to revisit.
Shortly after the fatwa, PEN America organized a public reading in downtown Manhattan. Among the speakers were Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Christopher Hitchens, and Robert Caro. Caro told the audience: "Censorship has been imposed in the United States. There are issues on which no compromise is possible, and this is one of them." 11 Hitchens later wrote that the fatwa represented "the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom." 3
Against this stood a range of voices that are harder to dismiss simply as apologists for violence. In a 1989 New York Times op-ed, former President Jimmy Carter wrote: "While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence." 11 The novelist John le Carré: "I don't think it is given to any of us to be impertinent to great religions with impunity." 6
Bernard Lewis, the historian of Islam, took a different angle from both camps: he argued the fatwa was theologically invalid under Islamic jurisprudence. Classical legal doctrine, Lewis pointed out, requires a trial, a confrontation with an accuser, and an opportunity for the accused to defend themselves and repent. "Even the most rigorous and extreme of the classical jurists," he wrote, "only require a Muslim to kill anyone who insults the Prophet in his hearing and in his presence. They say nothing about a hired killing for a reported insult in a distant country." 2
Rushdie spent years inside this debate whether he wanted to or not. In 2019, still accompanied by armed police at public appearances, he told an interviewer in Paris: "We live in a world where the subject changes very fast. And this is a very old subject. There are now many other things to be frightened about — and other people to kill." 2 Three years later he was on a ventilator.
By March 2026, speaking at the New Orleans Book Festival in conversation with George Packer of The Atlantic, Rushdie expressed a different kind of exhaustion: "When you've written 23 books, it's a little frustrating to be known not even for a book, but for something that happened to a book in 1989." 12 He added: "I don't feel symbolic. I feel actual. I feel like I'm a working writer trying to make his work." 12
Why it still matters in 2025
The Rushdie affair feels less like history and more like a template.
PEN America recorded 6,870 book ban instances across 23 states and 87 public school districts in the 2024–2025 school year — bringing the cumulative total since July 2021 to 22,810 instances affecting 3,752 unique titles. 13 The American Library Association (ALA) tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025 — the second-highest ever, behind only 2023's record of 4,240. 14 Ninety-two percent of those challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials, and institutional decision-makers — not by individual parents. 14
The logic driving these bans is structurally identical to the logic that banned The Satanic Verses in 1988: the idea that a community's sacred beliefs, or its sense of collective safety, authorizes it to remove a book from circulation. The specific sacred beliefs differ — a Muslim community's reverence for the Prophet; a religious conservative community's beliefs about gender and family — but the underlying claim is the same. This book harms us. It should not exist.
The parallels are not merely structural. Authors are now receiving death threats at a scale that prompted PEN America to launch its U.S. Author Safety Program in April 2026, backed by Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House, with nearly one million dollars raised toward a two-million-dollar goal. 15 Jodi Picoult, among the authors targeted, confirmed she received death threats: "As one of those targeted authors who received death threats, PEN America's safety team was a critical resource for me at a very dark time." 15 PEN America's 2025 membership survey found that 66% of respondents feel less safe than five years ago, and nearly one-third say they will be more cautious about what they write. 15
Maia Kobabe, whose graphic memoir Gender Queer was the most challenged book for three consecutive years (2021–2023), has offered the bluntest framing: "I definitely see book bans as the canary in the coalmine of the rise of fascism. Many authoritarian governments attack books, journalism, education and sources of information first because an uneducated and uninformed populace is easier to control." 16 Malinda Lo, author of Last Night at the Telegraph Club — banned in 19 school districts — and herself an immigrant from China: "I fear that we are well on our way to authoritarianism." 16
Whether one agrees with those framings or finds them overstated, the Rushdie case offers a data point that predates the current American debate by three and a half decades: threats against authors work. Translators were killed. Publishers were shot. Bookstores were bombed. Rushdie himself spent nine years unable to use his own name. And none of it stopped the book from being read. The Satanic Verses is, today, freely available across the Western world, in print and as an ebook, in translation into dozens of languages. The book outlasted the fatwa's enforcement. Whether the same will be said of the twenty-two thousand books currently banned from American school libraries remains to be seen.
Worth reading?
The honest answer: yes — but go in prepared.
The Satanic Verses is not an easy novel. At 546 pages, dense with allusion, Indian film references, and theological argument, it asks a lot. The prose is playful and demanding by turns; Rushdie's register can shift from slapstick to elegy within a single paragraph. The novel's greatest rewards — its treatment of identity and exile, the ache of belonging to two cultures and feeling fully at home in neither — take time to surface.
The controversy has become a film over the text. Many readers arrive expecting either a brave assault on religious obscurantism or an act of deliberate provocation, and find instead something stranger and more literary: a novel that is genuinely funny in places, genuinely sad in others, and ultimately more interested in whether it is possible to survive metamorphosis — to arrive in a new country, or a new life, without losing yourself entirely — than in scoring theological points.
The literary case for reading it is solid. Harold Bloom's assessment — "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement" 3 — is debatable (many critics prefer Midnight's Children), but the book has held up over thirty-five years as a serious work of postcolonial fiction, not merely a cause.
Who should read it:
- Readers already engaged with postcolonial literature (Achebe, Naipaul, Lahiri, Roy) will find it essential
- Those curious about the history of free expression and religious censorship
- Readers who want to understand what the fight was actually about — rather than inheriting someone else's summary of it
Difficulty: High. Not the right entry point for readers new to magical realism. Consider Midnight's Children first if you want to understand Rushdie's project before encountering its most contested work.
Emotional weight: Substantial — but the weight comes from complexity, not trauma. The novel is more unsettling than distressing.
Availability: Freely available in the US and UK. Current editions include the Random House Trade Paperbacks paperback (ISBN 978-0812976717) and the Vintage UK edition (ISBN 978-1784878948, October 2025). 3 Digital editions are available through major retailers. In India, the Delhi High Court's November 2024 ruling effectively removed the legal basis for the import ban, though the practical landscape for importation remains contested, and no Indian publisher has issued a domestic edition. 8
Cover image: Muslim protesters burning The Satanic Verses in Bradford, UK, January 1989, via Getty Images / BBC.
References
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- 2Wilson Center: Part 1 — Khomeini's Fatwa on Rushdie
wilsoncenter.org
- 3Wikipedia: The Satanic Verses
en.wikipedia.org
- 4Wikipedia: The Satanic Verses controversy
en.wikipedia.org
- 5Encyclopaedia Britannica: The Satanic Verses
britannica.com
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9The Guardian: A tsunami of outrage
theguardian.com
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- 11
- 12
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