On Valentine's Day 1989, a British-Indian novelist was issued a death sentence. His crime was writing a book.
This is the first of two episodes on Salman Rushdie. It tells the story of The Satanic Verses, why it caused outrage across the Muslim world, and the fatwa that put a price on his head.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:29] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in Britain, from that 20-year-old university student who was hanged for saying the wrong things at dinner right through to the present day.
[00:00:41] In parts two and three of this mini-series, this episode and the next one, we are going to talk about the most famous blasphemy controversy of the twentieth century: the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.
[00:00:55] It’s a story involving a best-selling author, questions of politics, identity and religion, the Ayatollah of Iran, a death sentence, an unsolved murder, an attempted murder, and fundamental questions about freedom of expression.
[00:01:13] We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:19] Salman Rushdie had a reputation for being something of a ladies’ man.
[00:01:25] He was a frequent feature on the London dinner party circuit, and by the late 1980s, he was already onto his second of what would be five wives.
[00:01:37] Valentine's Day, then, should have suited him well.
[00:01:42] It did not.
[00:01:44] It hadn’t started particularly well; he had gone to the funeral of his great friend, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
[00:01:53] And later on that day, things turned from bad to worse.
[00:02:00] He was at a friend's house when someone turned on the radio.
[00:02:05] The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against someone he deemed his opponent.
[00:02:18] This was not a political rival, the President of America, or an Iranian activist.
[00:02:26] The target was the then 41-year-old best-selling author, Salman Rushdie.
[00:02:33] His crime was blasphemy. In his novel The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah declared, he had insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:02:45] Now, Salman Rushdie was raised as a Muslim, he was a highly educated man, and had a strong knowledge of Islamic history and culture.
[00:02:56] He knew exactly what this meant.
[00:03:01] A fatwa was not a declaration that the state of Iran would be sending its own assassins, or that he would be tried and sentenced if he ever visited Iran.
[00:03:12] In this case, the fatwa functioned as a religious ruling calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie and those involved in spreading the book. Any Muslim who had the opportunity to carry out the sentence and failed to do so would be failing in their faith.
[00:03:34] This religious declaration was followed up with financial incentives.
[00:03:40] An Iranian religious foundation offered three million dollars to any Iranian citizen who killed him, and one million dollars to any non-Iranian who did the same.
[00:03:54] Within hours, the British government would place Rushdie under armed police protection.
[00:04:00] He went into hiding, and ever since, for the past four decades, his ability to live a normal life was over.
[00:04:11] This is almost certainly the most famous story of modern-day blasphemy in the English-speaking world, and asks important questions about freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and more.
[00:04:24] It’s also a long and complicated story, and I’m splitting it into two parts.
[00:04:30] Today we’ll talk about the lead up to the fatwa, and its immediate aftermath.
[00:04:36] And in the next episode we’ll talk about what has happened since, and reflect on the questions this whole episode got people talking about.
[00:04:47] So, back to Valentine’s Day, 1989.
[00:04:51] And in fact, back even further, as to understand how things had reached this point, we need to go back to the author himself, back to the book, and back to the man in Tehran whose word had just changed everything.
[00:05:08] Salman Rushdie was born in what was then Bombay on the 19th of June, 1947.
[00:05:16] This was less than two months before India gained its independence from Britain, and the India that he grew up in, this newly independent country, partitioned from Pakistan, it was still finding its shape.
[00:05:33] Rushdie was brought up as a Muslim, but not a particularly devout one.
[00:05:39] His family was very wealthy, and his father had been educated at Cambridge before becoming a successful businessman.
[00:05:49] When he was fourteen years old, the young Salman Rushdie was sent to England for his education. He went to a school called Rugby, which is incidentally where the game of rugby is said to have been invented.
[00:06:05] It's one of the most famous, prestigious and expensive private schools in the country, but he was something of an outsider; he was brown-skinned, he was Indian, he was Muslim, and he wasn’t particularly sporty or anything like that.
[00:06:23] He was clever, though, and this took him to Cambridge University, where he studied history, with a focus on the history of Islam.
[00:06:33] After graduating, like many of us, he wasn’t particularly sure about what to do next.
[00:06:40] He tried his hand at acting, without much success. He had always thought of himself as a gifted writer, so tried to make it as an author, but didn’t have much luck there either.
[00:06:54] Advertising, it turned out, was something he was very good at; he had a particular skill with words, and became a very successful advertising copywriter.
[00:07:05] He came up with several slogans I can still remember from my childhood, like “naughty but nice”, which was used to sell fresh cream cakes.
[00:07:16] But he always harboured greater ambitions, ambitions of becoming a professional writer, and throughout the 1970s he continued to hone his craft.
[00:07:30] His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975, but it was largely ignored.
[00:07:38] His breakthrough came in 1981 with a novel called Midnight's Children, which was a story about India at the moment of independence.
[00:07:49] It won the Booker Prize, and would later be voted the best Booker Prize winner of all time.
[00:07:57] It was also a controversial book, in parts. There was a passage about the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that she considered defamatory. She took him to court, and ended up winning.
[00:08:12] It was his first real brush with the law, but it would be nothing compared to what would come next.
[00:08:21] In September of 1988, he published The Satanic Verses.
[00:08:27] It was written in Rushdie’s trademark magical realism style, which is a style of writing that combines the real world and magical, impossible events.
[00:08:40] If you’re familiar with the writing of authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende, Rushdie wrote in a similar style. This is an important detail, because it is so clearly a work of fiction; there is no way anyone could read the book and interpret it as non-fiction.
[00:09:02] So, what happens in The Satanic Verses?
[00:09:06] Well, it’s quite a long and complicated novel, not least because there are multiple storylines, and it’s often very difficult to tell what is happening in reality and what is happening in a dream.
[00:09:21] At the centre of the book are two Indian men: Gibreel and Saladin.
[00:09:28] Gibreel is a famous Bollywood actor who plays gods and prophets on screen, and who is slowly losing his grip on reality.
[00:09:39] Saladin is a voice actor who has spent years in England trying to shed his Indian identity and become as English as possible.
[00:09:50] The novel opens with the two men falling from a hijacked aeroplane that has exploded above the English Channel, which is the stretch of water between England and France.
[00:10:02] They survive. Miraculously and without explanation.
[00:10:08] What follows is a novel in two registers: the real-world story of these two men navigating London, and a series of vivid, disturbing dream sequences.
[00:10:23] And it is in these dream sequences that the controversy began.
[00:10:29] In one of Gibreel's dreams, a prophet figure is building a new religion in a desert city.
[00:10:37] The prophet's name in the dream is Mahound.
[00:10:41] Now, you don’t have to be an Islamic scholar to guess that Mahound could be a reference to the prophet Muhammad, Gibreel could be a reference to the angel Gabriel and Saladin to the Muslim military leader who defeated the crusaders.
[00:10:59] Remember, Rushdie was a Cambridge-educated scholar of Islamic history, and these names were chosen precisely because of their relevance to Islam.
[00:11:10] And Mahound was a particularly offensive choice.
[00:11:15] It was a derogatory medieval European name for the Prophet Muhammad, and was used in crusading texts to portray Islam as a false religion.
[00:11:27] Now, had that been the only offensive choice, perhaps the reaction to The Satanic Verses might have been a little less extreme.
[00:11:38] It wasn’t.
[00:11:40] The most offensive part is when Gibreel has a dream about Mahound.
[00:11:46] Within the dream, the prophet is receiving revelations from an angel.
[00:11:52] But at one crucial moment, the wrong words come through — words that allow the worship of three pre-Islamic goddesses. The prophet recites them. Then the angel returns to correct the mistake: those words did not come from God.
[00:12:12] They came from Satan, who had slipped them in.
[00:12:16] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in Islamic theology here, but this is not something that Rushdie invented out of thin air.
[00:12:26] In several early Islamic sources, there are accounts of the prophet Muhammad receiving verses that he later came to believe had not come from God at all — that Satan had, somehow, corrupted the revelation.
[00:12:43] The story is known as the story of the gharaniq, from the Arabic word for cranes.
[00:12:50] It is highly contested, and many later scholars reject it.
[00:12:57] But it exists in the historical record and Rushdie, who had studied Islamic history at Cambridge, he knew it was there.
[00:13:07] Hence the name of the book: The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:11] This is what made the book so explosive. Islam centres on the belief that the Quran is the literal word of God, dictated, word for word, through the angel Jibreel, to the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:13:26] Every word. Every letter. Exactly as God intended.
[00:13:32] If someone raises even the possibility that the wrong words might have been inserted, they are not just asking a literary question. They are questioning the foundation the entire faith rests on.
[00:13:47] These weren’t the only offensive parts either.
[00:13:50] Rushdie also included a dream sequence involving a brothel in which the prostitutes share the same names as the Prophet’s wives.
[00:14:01] Now, Rushdie knew this book would be controversial. He later admitted that he “expected a few mullahs would be offended and call him names”. In other words, this might offend a few religious leaders, but that would be it.
[00:14:18] For a scholar of Islamic history, he seriously misjudged it.
[00:14:23] There were some concerns flagged during the editorial process in the UK, but the British publisher, Penguin, or Viking Penguin as it was at the time, went ahead with it anyway.
[00:14:38] And by the way, in case you haven’t heard of Penguin, it’s not some small, niche publisher; it’s one of the biggest in the world.
[00:14:47] Now, the book was initially well received by critics, and won the prestigious Whitbread prize a couple of months later.
[00:14:58] Many literary critics praised the novel as a daring and ambitious work of fiction.
[00:15:05] But at the same time as literary critics were praising it, there were concerns raised by the British Muslim community. Religious leaders wrote letters to their MPs calling for the book to be withdrawn from sale because of its offensive nature.
[00:15:24] And it wasn’t just in the UK.
[00:15:28] Further abroad, especially in countries with large Muslim or Muslim-majority populations, governments went further, and the book was either rejected by publishers or outright banned.
[00:15:42] India, Pakistan, then Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia...the list goes on.
[00:15:49] But coming back to the UK, the reaction was particularly complicated.
[00:15:55] The country had a growing Muslim population, especially in areas of Northern England which had large Pakistani-heritage communities.
[00:16:06] The complication here wasn’t just because of the content of the book, but who had written it.
[00:16:13] Rushdie was Indian, he was a Muslim.
[00:16:18] He, of all people, he shouldn’t be insulting the prophet or doing anything that could offend or marginalise a group that already felt on the margins of society.
[00:16:30] In cities like Bradford and Birmingham, Muslim communities were facing racism, unemployment, and a persistent sense of being ignored and undervalued by mainstream British society.
[00:16:45] And there was one of them, on the face of it, insulting the prophet Mohammad.
[00:16:52] Yet, other than his country of birth, his nominal religion and the colour of his skin, he shared very little with the south Asian immigrant community of places like Bradford.
[00:17:06] He had gone to one of the most exclusive private schools in Britain. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most establishment figures in British public life. He was a Booker Prize winner. A fixture at the best London dinner parties. Someone who moved in circles that had, for generations, treated people who looked like him as outsiders.
[00:17:31] He had used the material of South Asian life — of migration, faith and identity — he had used all of this to build his literary career, and in so doing had written words that he knew would be deeply offensive. In other words, he was a traitor.
[00:17:53] This all came to a head in January of 1989, when protestors in Bradford publicly burned a copy of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:04] To state the obvious, this was an oddity, an unusual event, in modern Britain. There were comparisons with Nazi Germany, when books by Jewish and politically undesirable authors were destroyed.
[00:18:20] Yes, it was a protest against The Satanic Verses, but it was also a protest against the perceived double standards we talked about in the previous episode, how blasphemy law protected Christianity, but offered no protections to Islam or any other religion for that matter.
[00:18:41] Now, we could continue talking about the reaction in Britain, but we need to move on to the fatwa, as this will be the defining event.
[00:18:52] We also need a little background on the man behind the fatwa, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:18:59] Khomeini was born either in 1900 or 1902 in a small town in central Iran.
[00:19:07] He too was a highly educated man, a man of letters, and a keen student not just of Islamic theology, but also of Western philosophy.
[00:19:19] His path was a religious one, and he eventually earned the title of ayatollah, which means "sign of God" and represents the highest level of learning in Shia Islamic scholarship.
[00:19:34] Now, traditionally, Shia clerics had stayed well away from political power. Their remit was the mosque, the madrass, and matters of religion.
[00:19:47] Over the course of his long life, however, Khomeini had come to adopt a different position.
[00:19:55] He argued that Islamic scholars had not just the right, but the duty, to govern.
[00:20:03] In a properly Islamic state, sovereignty did not belong to elected politicians or secular rulers.
[00:20:11] It belonged to religious scholars who understood divine law.
[00:20:17] Now, this made him a dangerous figure to the political leaders of Iran.
[00:20:23] He was exiled by the Western-backed Shah in 1964. He spent the next fifteen years in Iraq and then in a village outside Paris, continuing to write and teach, his voice reaching Iran through cassette tapes smuggled across the border.
[00:20:42] And when the revolution came, in 1978 and 1979, it was Khomeini who emerged as its undisputed leader.
[00:20:53] In February 1979, he flew back to Tehran.
[00:20:58] Millions came out into the streets to greet him. Within two weeks, the Shah's government had collapsed, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed.
[00:21:09] What Khomeini had created was a theocracy: a state in which religious law, as interpreted by the Supreme Leader, was supreme.
[00:21:22] Yes, there were other countries in which the law was heavily based on Islam, but Iran became the first modern country to create this kind of Islamic system ruled by religious leaders.
[00:21:37] As such, the Islamic Republic understood itself not just as the government of Iran, but as the leader of a global Islamic revolution, responsible for defending Muslims everywhere.
[00:21:54] By February 1989, however, the revolution was not in a strong position.
[00:22:01] Khomeini was almost ninety years old. He was ill. He would be dead by June.
[00:22:08] Iran was licking its wounds after a devastating eight-year conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians had died. The economy was struggling. There were signs of dissent.
[00:22:24] And then a British-Indian novelist published a book that was causing outrage across the Muslim world.
[00:22:32] A writer had insulted the Prophet. He had attacked Islam.
[00:22:37] Who was going to speak for the faith? Who had the authority to respond?
[00:22:43] The Supreme Leader of Iran, of course. Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:22:48] So, the fatwa was not only about a novel.
[00:22:52] It was about who was going to stand up for the global Muslim community, who had the right to define what counted as an attack on the faith, and ultimately, whether the Islamic Republic could project its power and moral authority far beyond its borders.
[00:23:11] Khomeini clearly thought that this responsibility lay with him.
[00:23:16] Now, the fatwa was issued on the 14th of February, 1989.
[00:23:22] Within hours, Rushdie was placed under armed police protection. He was moved to a safe house.
[00:23:29] His ability to go for a walk, to call a friend without taking precautions, to make a spontaneous decision about where to have lunch, all of it ended that day.
[00:23:40] He would not live a free and open life for nearly a decade.
[00:23:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode, part two of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:23:53] In the next episode, we'll follow Rushdie into the years that came after: the violence against those who helped publish the book, the arguments it provoked among some of the most famous writers in the world, and an extraordinary attempt on his life more than thirty years later.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:29] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in Britain, from that 20-year-old university student who was hanged for saying the wrong things at dinner right through to the present day.
[00:00:41] In parts two and three of this mini-series, this episode and the next one, we are going to talk about the most famous blasphemy controversy of the twentieth century: the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.
[00:00:55] It’s a story involving a best-selling author, questions of politics, identity and religion, the Ayatollah of Iran, a death sentence, an unsolved murder, an attempted murder, and fundamental questions about freedom of expression.
[00:01:13] We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:19] Salman Rushdie had a reputation for being something of a ladies’ man.
[00:01:25] He was a frequent feature on the London dinner party circuit, and by the late 1980s, he was already onto his second of what would be five wives.
[00:01:37] Valentine's Day, then, should have suited him well.
[00:01:42] It did not.
[00:01:44] It hadn’t started particularly well; he had gone to the funeral of his great friend, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
[00:01:53] And later on that day, things turned from bad to worse.
[00:02:00] He was at a friend's house when someone turned on the radio.
[00:02:05] The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against someone he deemed his opponent.
[00:02:18] This was not a political rival, the President of America, or an Iranian activist.
[00:02:26] The target was the then 41-year-old best-selling author, Salman Rushdie.
[00:02:33] His crime was blasphemy. In his novel The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah declared, he had insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:02:45] Now, Salman Rushdie was raised as a Muslim, he was a highly educated man, and had a strong knowledge of Islamic history and culture.
[00:02:56] He knew exactly what this meant.
[00:03:01] A fatwa was not a declaration that the state of Iran would be sending its own assassins, or that he would be tried and sentenced if he ever visited Iran.
[00:03:12] In this case, the fatwa functioned as a religious ruling calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie and those involved in spreading the book. Any Muslim who had the opportunity to carry out the sentence and failed to do so would be failing in their faith.
[00:03:34] This religious declaration was followed up with financial incentives.
[00:03:40] An Iranian religious foundation offered three million dollars to any Iranian citizen who killed him, and one million dollars to any non-Iranian who did the same.
[00:03:54] Within hours, the British government would place Rushdie under armed police protection.
[00:04:00] He went into hiding, and ever since, for the past four decades, his ability to live a normal life was over.
[00:04:11] This is almost certainly the most famous story of modern-day blasphemy in the English-speaking world, and asks important questions about freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and more.
[00:04:24] It’s also a long and complicated story, and I’m splitting it into two parts.
[00:04:30] Today we’ll talk about the lead up to the fatwa, and its immediate aftermath.
[00:04:36] And in the next episode we’ll talk about what has happened since, and reflect on the questions this whole episode got people talking about.
[00:04:47] So, back to Valentine’s Day, 1989.
[00:04:51] And in fact, back even further, as to understand how things had reached this point, we need to go back to the author himself, back to the book, and back to the man in Tehran whose word had just changed everything.
[00:05:08] Salman Rushdie was born in what was then Bombay on the 19th of June, 1947.
[00:05:16] This was less than two months before India gained its independence from Britain, and the India that he grew up in, this newly independent country, partitioned from Pakistan, it was still finding its shape.
[00:05:33] Rushdie was brought up as a Muslim, but not a particularly devout one.
[00:05:39] His family was very wealthy, and his father had been educated at Cambridge before becoming a successful businessman.
[00:05:49] When he was fourteen years old, the young Salman Rushdie was sent to England for his education. He went to a school called Rugby, which is incidentally where the game of rugby is said to have been invented.
[00:06:05] It's one of the most famous, prestigious and expensive private schools in the country, but he was something of an outsider; he was brown-skinned, he was Indian, he was Muslim, and he wasn’t particularly sporty or anything like that.
[00:06:23] He was clever, though, and this took him to Cambridge University, where he studied history, with a focus on the history of Islam.
[00:06:33] After graduating, like many of us, he wasn’t particularly sure about what to do next.
[00:06:40] He tried his hand at acting, without much success. He had always thought of himself as a gifted writer, so tried to make it as an author, but didn’t have much luck there either.
[00:06:54] Advertising, it turned out, was something he was very good at; he had a particular skill with words, and became a very successful advertising copywriter.
[00:07:05] He came up with several slogans I can still remember from my childhood, like “naughty but nice”, which was used to sell fresh cream cakes.
[00:07:16] But he always harboured greater ambitions, ambitions of becoming a professional writer, and throughout the 1970s he continued to hone his craft.
[00:07:30] His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975, but it was largely ignored.
[00:07:38] His breakthrough came in 1981 with a novel called Midnight's Children, which was a story about India at the moment of independence.
[00:07:49] It won the Booker Prize, and would later be voted the best Booker Prize winner of all time.
[00:07:57] It was also a controversial book, in parts. There was a passage about the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that she considered defamatory. She took him to court, and ended up winning.
[00:08:12] It was his first real brush with the law, but it would be nothing compared to what would come next.
[00:08:21] In September of 1988, he published The Satanic Verses.
[00:08:27] It was written in Rushdie’s trademark magical realism style, which is a style of writing that combines the real world and magical, impossible events.
[00:08:40] If you’re familiar with the writing of authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende, Rushdie wrote in a similar style. This is an important detail, because it is so clearly a work of fiction; there is no way anyone could read the book and interpret it as non-fiction.
[00:09:02] So, what happens in The Satanic Verses?
[00:09:06] Well, it’s quite a long and complicated novel, not least because there are multiple storylines, and it’s often very difficult to tell what is happening in reality and what is happening in a dream.
[00:09:21] At the centre of the book are two Indian men: Gibreel and Saladin.
[00:09:28] Gibreel is a famous Bollywood actor who plays gods and prophets on screen, and who is slowly losing his grip on reality.
[00:09:39] Saladin is a voice actor who has spent years in England trying to shed his Indian identity and become as English as possible.
[00:09:50] The novel opens with the two men falling from a hijacked aeroplane that has exploded above the English Channel, which is the stretch of water between England and France.
[00:10:02] They survive. Miraculously and without explanation.
[00:10:08] What follows is a novel in two registers: the real-world story of these two men navigating London, and a series of vivid, disturbing dream sequences.
[00:10:23] And it is in these dream sequences that the controversy began.
[00:10:29] In one of Gibreel's dreams, a prophet figure is building a new religion in a desert city.
[00:10:37] The prophet's name in the dream is Mahound.
[00:10:41] Now, you don’t have to be an Islamic scholar to guess that Mahound could be a reference to the prophet Muhammad, Gibreel could be a reference to the angel Gabriel and Saladin to the Muslim military leader who defeated the crusaders.
[00:10:59] Remember, Rushdie was a Cambridge-educated scholar of Islamic history, and these names were chosen precisely because of their relevance to Islam.
[00:11:10] And Mahound was a particularly offensive choice.
[00:11:15] It was a derogatory medieval European name for the Prophet Muhammad, and was used in crusading texts to portray Islam as a false religion.
[00:11:27] Now, had that been the only offensive choice, perhaps the reaction to The Satanic Verses might have been a little less extreme.
[00:11:38] It wasn’t.
[00:11:40] The most offensive part is when Gibreel has a dream about Mahound.
[00:11:46] Within the dream, the prophet is receiving revelations from an angel.
[00:11:52] But at one crucial moment, the wrong words come through — words that allow the worship of three pre-Islamic goddesses. The prophet recites them. Then the angel returns to correct the mistake: those words did not come from God.
[00:12:12] They came from Satan, who had slipped them in.
[00:12:16] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in Islamic theology here, but this is not something that Rushdie invented out of thin air.
[00:12:26] In several early Islamic sources, there are accounts of the prophet Muhammad receiving verses that he later came to believe had not come from God at all — that Satan had, somehow, corrupted the revelation.
[00:12:43] The story is known as the story of the gharaniq, from the Arabic word for cranes.
[00:12:50] It is highly contested, and many later scholars reject it.
[00:12:57] But it exists in the historical record and Rushdie, who had studied Islamic history at Cambridge, he knew it was there.
[00:13:07] Hence the name of the book: The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:11] This is what made the book so explosive. Islam centres on the belief that the Quran is the literal word of God, dictated, word for word, through the angel Jibreel, to the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:13:26] Every word. Every letter. Exactly as God intended.
[00:13:32] If someone raises even the possibility that the wrong words might have been inserted, they are not just asking a literary question. They are questioning the foundation the entire faith rests on.
[00:13:47] These weren’t the only offensive parts either.
[00:13:50] Rushdie also included a dream sequence involving a brothel in which the prostitutes share the same names as the Prophet’s wives.
[00:14:01] Now, Rushdie knew this book would be controversial. He later admitted that he “expected a few mullahs would be offended and call him names”. In other words, this might offend a few religious leaders, but that would be it.
[00:14:18] For a scholar of Islamic history, he seriously misjudged it.
[00:14:23] There were some concerns flagged during the editorial process in the UK, but the British publisher, Penguin, or Viking Penguin as it was at the time, went ahead with it anyway.
[00:14:38] And by the way, in case you haven’t heard of Penguin, it’s not some small, niche publisher; it’s one of the biggest in the world.
[00:14:47] Now, the book was initially well received by critics, and won the prestigious Whitbread prize a couple of months later.
[00:14:58] Many literary critics praised the novel as a daring and ambitious work of fiction.
[00:15:05] But at the same time as literary critics were praising it, there were concerns raised by the British Muslim community. Religious leaders wrote letters to their MPs calling for the book to be withdrawn from sale because of its offensive nature.
[00:15:24] And it wasn’t just in the UK.
[00:15:28] Further abroad, especially in countries with large Muslim or Muslim-majority populations, governments went further, and the book was either rejected by publishers or outright banned.
[00:15:42] India, Pakistan, then Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia...the list goes on.
[00:15:49] But coming back to the UK, the reaction was particularly complicated.
[00:15:55] The country had a growing Muslim population, especially in areas of Northern England which had large Pakistani-heritage communities.
[00:16:06] The complication here wasn’t just because of the content of the book, but who had written it.
[00:16:13] Rushdie was Indian, he was a Muslim.
[00:16:18] He, of all people, he shouldn’t be insulting the prophet or doing anything that could offend or marginalise a group that already felt on the margins of society.
[00:16:30] In cities like Bradford and Birmingham, Muslim communities were facing racism, unemployment, and a persistent sense of being ignored and undervalued by mainstream British society.
[00:16:45] And there was one of them, on the face of it, insulting the prophet Mohammad.
[00:16:52] Yet, other than his country of birth, his nominal religion and the colour of his skin, he shared very little with the south Asian immigrant community of places like Bradford.
[00:17:06] He had gone to one of the most exclusive private schools in Britain. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most establishment figures in British public life. He was a Booker Prize winner. A fixture at the best London dinner parties. Someone who moved in circles that had, for generations, treated people who looked like him as outsiders.
[00:17:31] He had used the material of South Asian life — of migration, faith and identity — he had used all of this to build his literary career, and in so doing had written words that he knew would be deeply offensive. In other words, he was a traitor.
[00:17:53] This all came to a head in January of 1989, when protestors in Bradford publicly burned a copy of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:04] To state the obvious, this was an oddity, an unusual event, in modern Britain. There were comparisons with Nazi Germany, when books by Jewish and politically undesirable authors were destroyed.
[00:18:20] Yes, it was a protest against The Satanic Verses, but it was also a protest against the perceived double standards we talked about in the previous episode, how blasphemy law protected Christianity, but offered no protections to Islam or any other religion for that matter.
[00:18:41] Now, we could continue talking about the reaction in Britain, but we need to move on to the fatwa, as this will be the defining event.
[00:18:52] We also need a little background on the man behind the fatwa, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:18:59] Khomeini was born either in 1900 or 1902 in a small town in central Iran.
[00:19:07] He too was a highly educated man, a man of letters, and a keen student not just of Islamic theology, but also of Western philosophy.
[00:19:19] His path was a religious one, and he eventually earned the title of ayatollah, which means "sign of God" and represents the highest level of learning in Shia Islamic scholarship.
[00:19:34] Now, traditionally, Shia clerics had stayed well away from political power. Their remit was the mosque, the madrass, and matters of religion.
[00:19:47] Over the course of his long life, however, Khomeini had come to adopt a different position.
[00:19:55] He argued that Islamic scholars had not just the right, but the duty, to govern.
[00:20:03] In a properly Islamic state, sovereignty did not belong to elected politicians or secular rulers.
[00:20:11] It belonged to religious scholars who understood divine law.
[00:20:17] Now, this made him a dangerous figure to the political leaders of Iran.
[00:20:23] He was exiled by the Western-backed Shah in 1964. He spent the next fifteen years in Iraq and then in a village outside Paris, continuing to write and teach, his voice reaching Iran through cassette tapes smuggled across the border.
[00:20:42] And when the revolution came, in 1978 and 1979, it was Khomeini who emerged as its undisputed leader.
[00:20:53] In February 1979, he flew back to Tehran.
[00:20:58] Millions came out into the streets to greet him. Within two weeks, the Shah's government had collapsed, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed.
[00:21:09] What Khomeini had created was a theocracy: a state in which religious law, as interpreted by the Supreme Leader, was supreme.
[00:21:22] Yes, there were other countries in which the law was heavily based on Islam, but Iran became the first modern country to create this kind of Islamic system ruled by religious leaders.
[00:21:37] As such, the Islamic Republic understood itself not just as the government of Iran, but as the leader of a global Islamic revolution, responsible for defending Muslims everywhere.
[00:21:54] By February 1989, however, the revolution was not in a strong position.
[00:22:01] Khomeini was almost ninety years old. He was ill. He would be dead by June.
[00:22:08] Iran was licking its wounds after a devastating eight-year conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians had died. The economy was struggling. There were signs of dissent.
[00:22:24] And then a British-Indian novelist published a book that was causing outrage across the Muslim world.
[00:22:32] A writer had insulted the Prophet. He had attacked Islam.
[00:22:37] Who was going to speak for the faith? Who had the authority to respond?
[00:22:43] The Supreme Leader of Iran, of course. Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:22:48] So, the fatwa was not only about a novel.
[00:22:52] It was about who was going to stand up for the global Muslim community, who had the right to define what counted as an attack on the faith, and ultimately, whether the Islamic Republic could project its power and moral authority far beyond its borders.
[00:23:11] Khomeini clearly thought that this responsibility lay with him.
[00:23:16] Now, the fatwa was issued on the 14th of February, 1989.
[00:23:22] Within hours, Rushdie was placed under armed police protection. He was moved to a safe house.
[00:23:29] His ability to go for a walk, to call a friend without taking precautions, to make a spontaneous decision about where to have lunch, all of it ended that day.
[00:23:40] He would not live a free and open life for nearly a decade.
[00:23:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode, part two of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:23:53] In the next episode, we'll follow Rushdie into the years that came after: the violence against those who helped publish the book, the arguments it provoked among some of the most famous writers in the world, and an extraordinary attempt on his life more than thirty years later.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and this is part two of our three-part mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:00:29] In part one, we traced the history of blasphemy in Britain, from that 20-year-old university student who was hanged for saying the wrong things at dinner right through to the present day.
[00:00:41] In parts two and three of this mini-series, this episode and the next one, we are going to talk about the most famous blasphemy controversy of the twentieth century: the story of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.
[00:00:55] It’s a story involving a best-selling author, questions of politics, identity and religion, the Ayatollah of Iran, a death sentence, an unsolved murder, an attempted murder, and fundamental questions about freedom of expression.
[00:01:13] We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s get right into it.
[00:01:19] Salman Rushdie had a reputation for being something of a ladies’ man.
[00:01:25] He was a frequent feature on the London dinner party circuit, and by the late 1980s, he was already onto his second of what would be five wives.
[00:01:37] Valentine's Day, then, should have suited him well.
[00:01:42] It did not.
[00:01:44] It hadn’t started particularly well; he had gone to the funeral of his great friend, the travel writer Bruce Chatwin.
[00:01:53] And later on that day, things turned from bad to worse.
[00:02:00] He was at a friend's house when someone turned on the radio.
[00:02:05] The Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa, a death sentence, against someone he deemed his opponent.
[00:02:18] This was not a political rival, the President of America, or an Iranian activist.
[00:02:26] The target was the then 41-year-old best-selling author, Salman Rushdie.
[00:02:33] His crime was blasphemy. In his novel The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah declared, he had insulted Islam and the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:02:45] Now, Salman Rushdie was raised as a Muslim, he was a highly educated man, and had a strong knowledge of Islamic history and culture.
[00:02:56] He knew exactly what this meant.
[00:03:01] A fatwa was not a declaration that the state of Iran would be sending its own assassins, or that he would be tried and sentenced if he ever visited Iran.
[00:03:12] In this case, the fatwa functioned as a religious ruling calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie and those involved in spreading the book. Any Muslim who had the opportunity to carry out the sentence and failed to do so would be failing in their faith.
[00:03:34] This religious declaration was followed up with financial incentives.
[00:03:40] An Iranian religious foundation offered three million dollars to any Iranian citizen who killed him, and one million dollars to any non-Iranian who did the same.
[00:03:54] Within hours, the British government would place Rushdie under armed police protection.
[00:04:00] He went into hiding, and ever since, for the past four decades, his ability to live a normal life was over.
[00:04:11] This is almost certainly the most famous story of modern-day blasphemy in the English-speaking world, and asks important questions about freedom of speech, religious tolerance, and more.
[00:04:24] It’s also a long and complicated story, and I’m splitting it into two parts.
[00:04:30] Today we’ll talk about the lead up to the fatwa, and its immediate aftermath.
[00:04:36] And in the next episode we’ll talk about what has happened since, and reflect on the questions this whole episode got people talking about.
[00:04:47] So, back to Valentine’s Day, 1989.
[00:04:51] And in fact, back even further, as to understand how things had reached this point, we need to go back to the author himself, back to the book, and back to the man in Tehran whose word had just changed everything.
[00:05:08] Salman Rushdie was born in what was then Bombay on the 19th of June, 1947.
[00:05:16] This was less than two months before India gained its independence from Britain, and the India that he grew up in, this newly independent country, partitioned from Pakistan, it was still finding its shape.
[00:05:33] Rushdie was brought up as a Muslim, but not a particularly devout one.
[00:05:39] His family was very wealthy, and his father had been educated at Cambridge before becoming a successful businessman.
[00:05:49] When he was fourteen years old, the young Salman Rushdie was sent to England for his education. He went to a school called Rugby, which is incidentally where the game of rugby is said to have been invented.
[00:06:05] It's one of the most famous, prestigious and expensive private schools in the country, but he was something of an outsider; he was brown-skinned, he was Indian, he was Muslim, and he wasn’t particularly sporty or anything like that.
[00:06:23] He was clever, though, and this took him to Cambridge University, where he studied history, with a focus on the history of Islam.
[00:06:33] After graduating, like many of us, he wasn’t particularly sure about what to do next.
[00:06:40] He tried his hand at acting, without much success. He had always thought of himself as a gifted writer, so tried to make it as an author, but didn’t have much luck there either.
[00:06:54] Advertising, it turned out, was something he was very good at; he had a particular skill with words, and became a very successful advertising copywriter.
[00:07:05] He came up with several slogans I can still remember from my childhood, like “naughty but nice”, which was used to sell fresh cream cakes.
[00:07:16] But he always harboured greater ambitions, ambitions of becoming a professional writer, and throughout the 1970s he continued to hone his craft.
[00:07:30] His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975, but it was largely ignored.
[00:07:38] His breakthrough came in 1981 with a novel called Midnight's Children, which was a story about India at the moment of independence.
[00:07:49] It won the Booker Prize, and would later be voted the best Booker Prize winner of all time.
[00:07:57] It was also a controversial book, in parts. There was a passage about the then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi that she considered defamatory. She took him to court, and ended up winning.
[00:08:12] It was his first real brush with the law, but it would be nothing compared to what would come next.
[00:08:21] In September of 1988, he published The Satanic Verses.
[00:08:27] It was written in Rushdie’s trademark magical realism style, which is a style of writing that combines the real world and magical, impossible events.
[00:08:40] If you’re familiar with the writing of authors like Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende, Rushdie wrote in a similar style. This is an important detail, because it is so clearly a work of fiction; there is no way anyone could read the book and interpret it as non-fiction.
[00:09:02] So, what happens in The Satanic Verses?
[00:09:06] Well, it’s quite a long and complicated novel, not least because there are multiple storylines, and it’s often very difficult to tell what is happening in reality and what is happening in a dream.
[00:09:21] At the centre of the book are two Indian men: Gibreel and Saladin.
[00:09:28] Gibreel is a famous Bollywood actor who plays gods and prophets on screen, and who is slowly losing his grip on reality.
[00:09:39] Saladin is a voice actor who has spent years in England trying to shed his Indian identity and become as English as possible.
[00:09:50] The novel opens with the two men falling from a hijacked aeroplane that has exploded above the English Channel, which is the stretch of water between England and France.
[00:10:02] They survive. Miraculously and without explanation.
[00:10:08] What follows is a novel in two registers: the real-world story of these two men navigating London, and a series of vivid, disturbing dream sequences.
[00:10:23] And it is in these dream sequences that the controversy began.
[00:10:29] In one of Gibreel's dreams, a prophet figure is building a new religion in a desert city.
[00:10:37] The prophet's name in the dream is Mahound.
[00:10:41] Now, you don’t have to be an Islamic scholar to guess that Mahound could be a reference to the prophet Muhammad, Gibreel could be a reference to the angel Gabriel and Saladin to the Muslim military leader who defeated the crusaders.
[00:10:59] Remember, Rushdie was a Cambridge-educated scholar of Islamic history, and these names were chosen precisely because of their relevance to Islam.
[00:11:10] And Mahound was a particularly offensive choice.
[00:11:15] It was a derogatory medieval European name for the Prophet Muhammad, and was used in crusading texts to portray Islam as a false religion.
[00:11:27] Now, had that been the only offensive choice, perhaps the reaction to The Satanic Verses might have been a little less extreme.
[00:11:38] It wasn’t.
[00:11:40] The most offensive part is when Gibreel has a dream about Mahound.
[00:11:46] Within the dream, the prophet is receiving revelations from an angel.
[00:11:52] But at one crucial moment, the wrong words come through — words that allow the worship of three pre-Islamic goddesses. The prophet recites them. Then the angel returns to correct the mistake: those words did not come from God.
[00:12:12] They came from Satan, who had slipped them in.
[00:12:16] Now, I don't want to get too bogged down in Islamic theology here, but this is not something that Rushdie invented out of thin air.
[00:12:26] In several early Islamic sources, there are accounts of the prophet Muhammad receiving verses that he later came to believe had not come from God at all — that Satan had, somehow, corrupted the revelation.
[00:12:43] The story is known as the story of the gharaniq, from the Arabic word for cranes.
[00:12:50] It is highly contested, and many later scholars reject it.
[00:12:57] But it exists in the historical record and Rushdie, who had studied Islamic history at Cambridge, he knew it was there.
[00:13:07] Hence the name of the book: The Satanic Verses.
[00:13:11] This is what made the book so explosive. Islam centres on the belief that the Quran is the literal word of God, dictated, word for word, through the angel Jibreel, to the Prophet Muhammad.
[00:13:26] Every word. Every letter. Exactly as God intended.
[00:13:32] If someone raises even the possibility that the wrong words might have been inserted, they are not just asking a literary question. They are questioning the foundation the entire faith rests on.
[00:13:47] These weren’t the only offensive parts either.
[00:13:50] Rushdie also included a dream sequence involving a brothel in which the prostitutes share the same names as the Prophet’s wives.
[00:14:01] Now, Rushdie knew this book would be controversial. He later admitted that he “expected a few mullahs would be offended and call him names”. In other words, this might offend a few religious leaders, but that would be it.
[00:14:18] For a scholar of Islamic history, he seriously misjudged it.
[00:14:23] There were some concerns flagged during the editorial process in the UK, but the British publisher, Penguin, or Viking Penguin as it was at the time, went ahead with it anyway.
[00:14:38] And by the way, in case you haven’t heard of Penguin, it’s not some small, niche publisher; it’s one of the biggest in the world.
[00:14:47] Now, the book was initially well received by critics, and won the prestigious Whitbread prize a couple of months later.
[00:14:58] Many literary critics praised the novel as a daring and ambitious work of fiction.
[00:15:05] But at the same time as literary critics were praising it, there were concerns raised by the British Muslim community. Religious leaders wrote letters to their MPs calling for the book to be withdrawn from sale because of its offensive nature.
[00:15:24] And it wasn’t just in the UK.
[00:15:28] Further abroad, especially in countries with large Muslim or Muslim-majority populations, governments went further, and the book was either rejected by publishers or outright banned.
[00:15:42] India, Pakistan, then Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia...the list goes on.
[00:15:49] But coming back to the UK, the reaction was particularly complicated.
[00:15:55] The country had a growing Muslim population, especially in areas of Northern England which had large Pakistani-heritage communities.
[00:16:06] The complication here wasn’t just because of the content of the book, but who had written it.
[00:16:13] Rushdie was Indian, he was a Muslim.
[00:16:18] He, of all people, he shouldn’t be insulting the prophet or doing anything that could offend or marginalise a group that already felt on the margins of society.
[00:16:30] In cities like Bradford and Birmingham, Muslim communities were facing racism, unemployment, and a persistent sense of being ignored and undervalued by mainstream British society.
[00:16:45] And there was one of them, on the face of it, insulting the prophet Mohammad.
[00:16:52] Yet, other than his country of birth, his nominal religion and the colour of his skin, he shared very little with the south Asian immigrant community of places like Bradford.
[00:17:06] He had gone to one of the most exclusive private schools in Britain. By the late 1980s, he had become one of the most establishment figures in British public life. He was a Booker Prize winner. A fixture at the best London dinner parties. Someone who moved in circles that had, for generations, treated people who looked like him as outsiders.
[00:17:31] He had used the material of South Asian life — of migration, faith and identity — he had used all of this to build his literary career, and in so doing had written words that he knew would be deeply offensive. In other words, he was a traitor.
[00:17:53] This all came to a head in January of 1989, when protestors in Bradford publicly burned a copy of The Satanic Verses.
[00:18:04] To state the obvious, this was an oddity, an unusual event, in modern Britain. There were comparisons with Nazi Germany, when books by Jewish and politically undesirable authors were destroyed.
[00:18:20] Yes, it was a protest against The Satanic Verses, but it was also a protest against the perceived double standards we talked about in the previous episode, how blasphemy law protected Christianity, but offered no protections to Islam or any other religion for that matter.
[00:18:41] Now, we could continue talking about the reaction in Britain, but we need to move on to the fatwa, as this will be the defining event.
[00:18:52] We also need a little background on the man behind the fatwa, the Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:18:59] Khomeini was born either in 1900 or 1902 in a small town in central Iran.
[00:19:07] He too was a highly educated man, a man of letters, and a keen student not just of Islamic theology, but also of Western philosophy.
[00:19:19] His path was a religious one, and he eventually earned the title of ayatollah, which means "sign of God" and represents the highest level of learning in Shia Islamic scholarship.
[00:19:34] Now, traditionally, Shia clerics had stayed well away from political power. Their remit was the mosque, the madrass, and matters of religion.
[00:19:47] Over the course of his long life, however, Khomeini had come to adopt a different position.
[00:19:55] He argued that Islamic scholars had not just the right, but the duty, to govern.
[00:20:03] In a properly Islamic state, sovereignty did not belong to elected politicians or secular rulers.
[00:20:11] It belonged to religious scholars who understood divine law.
[00:20:17] Now, this made him a dangerous figure to the political leaders of Iran.
[00:20:23] He was exiled by the Western-backed Shah in 1964. He spent the next fifteen years in Iraq and then in a village outside Paris, continuing to write and teach, his voice reaching Iran through cassette tapes smuggled across the border.
[00:20:42] And when the revolution came, in 1978 and 1979, it was Khomeini who emerged as its undisputed leader.
[00:20:53] In February 1979, he flew back to Tehran.
[00:20:58] Millions came out into the streets to greet him. Within two weeks, the Shah's government had collapsed, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed.
[00:21:09] What Khomeini had created was a theocracy: a state in which religious law, as interpreted by the Supreme Leader, was supreme.
[00:21:22] Yes, there were other countries in which the law was heavily based on Islam, but Iran became the first modern country to create this kind of Islamic system ruled by religious leaders.
[00:21:37] As such, the Islamic Republic understood itself not just as the government of Iran, but as the leader of a global Islamic revolution, responsible for defending Muslims everywhere.
[00:21:54] By February 1989, however, the revolution was not in a strong position.
[00:22:01] Khomeini was almost ninety years old. He was ill. He would be dead by June.
[00:22:08] Iran was licking its wounds after a devastating eight-year conflict with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians had died. The economy was struggling. There were signs of dissent.
[00:22:24] And then a British-Indian novelist published a book that was causing outrage across the Muslim world.
[00:22:32] A writer had insulted the Prophet. He had attacked Islam.
[00:22:37] Who was going to speak for the faith? Who had the authority to respond?
[00:22:43] The Supreme Leader of Iran, of course. Ayatollah Khomeini.
[00:22:48] So, the fatwa was not only about a novel.
[00:22:52] It was about who was going to stand up for the global Muslim community, who had the right to define what counted as an attack on the faith, and ultimately, whether the Islamic Republic could project its power and moral authority far beyond its borders.
[00:23:11] Khomeini clearly thought that this responsibility lay with him.
[00:23:16] Now, the fatwa was issued on the 14th of February, 1989.
[00:23:22] Within hours, Rushdie was placed under armed police protection. He was moved to a safe house.
[00:23:29] His ability to go for a walk, to call a friend without taking precautions, to make a spontaneous decision about where to have lunch, all of it ended that day.
[00:23:40] He would not live a free and open life for nearly a decade.
[00:23:45] OK then, that is it for today's episode, part two of our mini-series on blasphemy and free expression.
[00:23:53] In the next episode, we'll follow Rushdie into the years that came after: the violence against those who helped publish the book, the arguments it provoked among some of the most famous writers in the world, and an extraordinary attempt on his life more than thirty years later.
[00:24:10] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
