India’s ban on Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ may ease now. Why has the book been so controversial?

Over 36 years ago, India banned Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses book, citing it to be blasphemous. Now, after so many years, it seems that the ban is being lifted owing to a technicality.

On hearing a petition challenging the 1988 ban on the book, the Delhi High Court noted that the government was unable to produce an original notification document that banned the import of the book and hence, it had to be presumed that it does not exist.

“We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists,” the Delhi High Court said in the order, adding that the petitioner is now “entitled to take all actions in respect of the said book as available in law”, which could pave the way for bringing the controversial book back to India.

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As the book claims headlines again in the country, we take a look at why the novel, which was published three decades ago, is perhaps one of the most controversial books in India as well as the world.

Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

In 1988, Salman Rushdie, who was born in India and later grew up in England, published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. The book deals with Muslim religious beliefs, with Rushdie in dream sequences challenging some of the religion’s most sensitive tenets.

One of the main characters, Gibreel Farishta, has a series of dreams in which he becomes his namesake, the angel Gibreel. In these dreams, Gibreel encounters another central character, which is reminiscent of Islam’s account of the angel’s encounters with Prophet Muhammad.

In the Satanic Verses, however, he names the other character, who is reminiscent of the Prophet, as Mahound. This name was used in medieval Christian plays to represent satanic figures, and some Muslims concluded that Rushdie was implying that Muhammad was a false prophet.

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The backlash begins

Soon after the book’s publication, it received immediate and violent backlash from Muslims, who alleged that Rushdie’s writing was insulting to Islam. Bookstores carrying The Satanic Verses were vandalised across the world.

The New York offices of Viking Penguin, the publisher of the book, received seven bomb threats, and several bookstores across the UK were bombed.

The outrage against Rushdie over his book reached a climax on February 12, 1989, when as many as 10,000 people gathered against Rushdie and stormed the American Cultural Centre in Islamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters died in the attack.

Two days later, the then Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against Rushdie and the publishers of the book, calling for the author’s 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,” Khomeini was quoted as telling Tehran Radio.

An Iranian religious foundation even offered a $1 million bounty, $3 million if an Iranian carried out the killing.

Meanwhile, the British Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie police protection. But this also led to Iran breaking ties with the Western country.

Seeing the outrage and anger, many countries banned The Satanic Verses. India, under the Rajiv Gandhi government, banned it for law-and-order reasons.

Threats to Rushdie collaborators

Unable to reach Rushdie himself, who had gone into hiding, extremists began attacking his literary collaborators. On July 3, 1991, Rushdie’s Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured in a knife attack at his home in Milan.

Ten days after the attack on Capriolo, Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie’s Japanese translator, was found stabbed to death in his office at the University of Tsukuba.

Two years later, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot and seriously injured. In a separate incident, a mob set fire to the Madimak Hotel in Turkey, where Rushdie’s Turkish translator Aziz Nesin was attending the Pir Sultan Abdal festival. A total of 37 people were killed in the attack known as the Sivas massacre. Nesin managed to escape death.

Attack on Rushdie

In August 2022, 34 years after the publication of The Satanic Verses, one would assume the dust had settled on the publication of the book.

However, that was not the case. When Rushdie stood up to give a lecture in Chautauqua, western New York, an unidentified man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him in the face, neck, arm and abdomen. Rushdie fell to the floor where he lay with “a spectacular quantity of blood” all around him. He was taken to a hospital by helicopter and spent six weeks recovering there. The trauma surgeons who treated Rushdie’s injuries have said they initially didn’t think he would survive. The 76-year-old author suffered 14 stab wounds and lost his right eye.

His assailant, later identified as New Jersey man Hadi Matar, was arrested at the scene and charged with attempted murder and assault. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and is awaiting trial.

Two years after the incident, Rushdie released a book, titled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which he recounts the 2022 stabbing. He said he didn’t want to write about the incident for a long time, but it became something he had to do because he “couldn’t really focus on anything else”.

In defence of Rushdie

Since Rushdie released The Satanic Verses and it created such a furore, some scholars have argued that his “irreverent mockery” is intended to explore whether it is possible to separate fact from fiction.

Rushdie, himself, has argued that religious texts should be open to challenge. “Why can’t we debate Islam?” Rushdie said in a 2015 interview. “It is possible to respect individuals, to protect them from intolerance, while being sceptical about their ideas, even criticising them ferociously.”

But it seems that the debate continues with no resolution in sight. As The Guardian once wrote, “The unresolved debate about The Satanic Verses poses complex and ever-pressing questions about free speech, and whether limits should be imposed upon it.”

With inputs from agencies