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This is the full version of my comment on the occasion of teh 20th anniversary of the fatwa on Salman Rushdie in relation to his novel, 'The Satanic Verses'. An excellent article by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent newspaper recently drew on this statement:
‘The Rushdie Affair’ was a wholly negative phenomenon. An ingratiating cyclopaedia drawn straight from Mediaeval Frankenreich, ‘The Satanic Verses’ was crack cocaine for bigots. The affair empowered both Islamism and liberal imperialism and set up the ongoing ‘straw man’ dualism in which globally writers of Muslim origin perpetually are expected to display loyalty to one or other of these extremist positions and in their work to essentialise, exoticise and otherwise limit their freedom of expression. It also initiated the hilarious fashion for fatwas at the drop of a hat! All novels are political, but entirely predictably this book became a political football in a game in which the only winners were the hooligans.
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