Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In January 1989, Muslims across Britain gathered in the northern industrial city of Bradford to protest against the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988). Some members of the community perceived it to be a work of obscene blasphemy. It renamed the Prophet Muhammad “Mahound” (meaning false prophet); it questioned the historical provenance of the Qur'an; it appeared to re-cast the wives of the Prophet as whores. The demonstration in Bradford, which culminated in the burning of the book outside City Hall, came to represent the most dramatic reception of a fictional text ever witnessed. Repeatedly disseminated by the national and international media, the flaming cover of The Satanic Verses became an iconic image of the late 1980s and, subsequently, a key intertext in novels such as Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album (1995) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000).In the month after the Bradford book burning, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death sentence, on Rushdie, driving the author of The Satanic Verses into hiding for nearly a decade. The novel was banned in 45 Islamic countries and its Japanese translator was killed. What became known as “the Rushdie affair” was generally understood as highlighting certain irreconcilable differences between a rational West and a fanatical East, between the values of censorship and free speech, fundamentalist religious intolerance ... log in or subscribe to read full text