The Rushdie Affair – Blasphemous Rumours

Origin Story

The final episode of season five covers the Rushdie Affair. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie made The Satanic Verses the most famous novel in the world — for all the wrong reasons. The controversy had far-reaching implications for free speech, international relations and the political identity of British Muslims. Although the issue seemed to have been resolved in 1998, the attempted murder of Rushdie in 2022 showed that it was far from over.

Dorian and Ian tell the whole story from all angles: Rushdie’s decade in hiding, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia, community relations in Britain, divisions in the literary scene, and the conflicted responses of politicians around the world.

What exactly did The Satanic Verses say that made people so angry? Which public figures were on Rushdie’s side and which ones thought he had it coming? How did Rushdie get his life back, only to almost lose it decades later? And what is the cultural and political legacy of the affair today? It is a tale of artistic freedom colliding with religious dogma and political calculations to turn a work of fiction into an international incident for the first time.

Reading list

Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007)

Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010)

Daniel Pipes – The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990)

Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses (1988)

Salman Rushdie – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991)

Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton (2012)

Salman Rushdie – Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024)

Articles

John Cunningham – ‘Sentenced to the prison of the word’, The Guardian (1990)

Will Lloyd – How We Gave Up on Salman Rushdie, UnHerd (2022)

Dorian Lynskey – Salman Rushdie on Quichotte: “The world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end” the i (2019)

Sean O’Grady – The Satanic Verses 30 Years On review, The Independent (2019)

David Remnick – The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, New Yorker (2023)

Salman Rushdie – The Disappeared, New Yorker (2012)

Words for Salman Rushdie – New York Times (1989)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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