The Charge

On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, issued a fatwa declaring that Salman Rushdie — the British-Indian novelist, born Muslim, author of “The Satanic Verses” (1988) — was an apostate whose death was required by Islamic law. He invited Muslims throughout the world to carry out the sentence. An Iranian foundation offered a bounty: initially $1 million, later raised to $3 million for Iranian citizens and $1 million for non-Iranians. The bounty has been periodically renewed and increased in the decades since.

“The Satanic Verses” is a novel. It is not a simple polemic against Islam; it is a densely allusive, formally experimental work of fiction in the tradition of Midnight’s Children and The Moor’s Sigh — magical realism applied to questions of identity, migration, religious faith, and the experience of being a South Asian in Britain. One section of the novel involves dreams by a character named Gibreel Farishta; within those dreams, there is a portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad — here named “Mahound” — and his companions that drew on medieval anti-Islamic polemic and presented elements of the Prophet’s life in ways that Muslims found deeply offensive.

Rushdie had not predicted the response, though he had known the book was controversial. The fatwa was issued in the context of a broader campaign against the novel that had been building for months: book burnings in Bradford, protests across the Muslim world, five deaths in riots in Pakistan. Khomeini’s fatwa transformed a literary controversy into a geopolitical crisis.

The Proceedings

There were no proceedings in any legal sense. The fatwa was a religious edict issued without hearing, without evidence, without the possibility of response or appeal. Khomeini had not read the book. The charge of blasphemy and apostasy was assessed from descriptions of its contents. The sentence — death — was a unilateral declaration by a head of state acting in a religious capacity, directed at a British citizen on British soil.

Britain went to a state of heightened alert. Rushdie went into hiding, protected by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, moving between safe houses. He was permitted to see almost no one. The operation protecting him, “Operation Mallon,” lasted nine years and cost the British government an estimated £11 million annually at its peak. Rushdie later described the experience in his memoir, “Joseph Anton” (2012) — the title taken from the pseudonym he used in hiding, a combination of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.

The consequences for those associated with the book were severe. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator, was stabbed to death in July 1991. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was stabbed and seriously injured the same month. William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher, was shot three times outside his home in October 1993 and survived. Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator, survived an arson attack in Sivas in 1993 that killed 35 people. A number of bookshops in Britain were bombed. These were not incidental to the fatwa; they were its intended mechanism.

The Outcome

Rushdie emerged from hiding gradually after Iran and Britain normalized diplomatic relations in 1998, and the Iranian government — not the Supreme Leader, who had died in 1989 — issued a statement that it would not encourage carrying out the fatwa. The fatwa itself was never formally lifted; under Shi’a jurisprudence, only the issuer can rescind a fatwa, and Khomeini died before doing so.

Rushdie became, in the years after his emergence, one of the most prominent and outspoken advocates for free expression in the world. He wrote further novels, delivered lectures, engaged in public debate, and refused — deliberately and publicly — to be defined entirely by the events of 1989. On August 12, 2022, at a lecture in upstate New York, he was stabbed fifteen times by a 24-year-old New Jersey man with sympathies toward Khomeini. Rushdie survived, losing sight in one eye and use of one hand. He published a memoir of the attack, “Knife,” in 2024.

What it Teaches

The Rushdie affair does not fit the category of “trial” as normally understood, which is why it is the most interesting case in this series. There was no procedure, no hearing, no accusation answered and examined, no appeal. There was a religious authority claiming jurisdiction over the life of a citizen of another country, based on that country’s religious laws, directing co-religionists worldwide to act as executioners. The episode exposes a fundamental clash between two frameworks for organizing human communities around speech: the secular liberal framework, which holds that states may not punish speech as such, and that religious authority has no automatic claim on citizens of other faiths or no faith; and certain interpretations of religious law, which claim jurisdiction over the believers — and, in some formulations, over all — based on the authority of God rather than the consent of the governed.

The affair also revealed deep fault lines within the liberal West. A significant number of public intellectuals — some out of sympathy with Muslim grievances, some out of discomfort with Rushdie’s perceived arrogance, some out of a misplaced multiculturalism that could not straightforwardly condemn a non-Western response to perceived offense — failed to defend him, or defended him with reservations that somewhat undermined the defense. John Berger suggested he should withdraw the paperback edition. Roald Dahl said Rushdie was “a dangerous opportunist.” Jimmy Carter urged Rushdie to be sensitive to Muslim feelings. These responses, well-intentioned or not, demonstrated that even people who valued free expression were willing to find exceptions when the offense was given by someone with cultural privilege to someone without it.

What the affair teaches, definitively, is that free expression is not a comfortable value. It is expensive to defend in specific cases, it protects speech one finds offensive, and it requires saying clearly that the appropriate response to a book one finds blasphemous is not to kill the author. That this needs saying at all — that it needed saying then, and still needs saying now — is the measure of the problem the affair revealed.