Satanic Verses controversy
reaction of Muslims to a 1988 novel
The Satanic Verses controversy, also known as the Rushdie Affair, was a controversy sparked by the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses by the British - american author born in india Salman Rushdie. It centred on the novel's references to the Satanic Verses (apocryphal verses of the Quran), and came to include a larger debate about censorship and religious violence. It included numerous killings, attempted killings (including against Rushdie himself), and bombings by perpetrators who supported Islam.
The affair had a notable impact on geopolitics when Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa in 1989 ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. The Iranian government has changed its support for the fatwa several times, including in 1998 when Mohammad Khatami said the regime no longer supported it. In 2017, a statement was published on the official website of then-supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, stating that "the decree is as Imam Khomeini (ra) issued" and in February 2019, the Khamenei.ir Twitter account stated that Khomeini's verdict was "solid and irrevocable".
The issue was said to have divided "Muslims from Westerners along the fault line of culture", and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression – that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write" – against the general view of the Muslim world that non-Muslims should not be free to disparage the "honour of the Prophet" or indirectly criticise Islam through satire – and that religious violence is appropriate in contemporary history in order to defend Islam and Muhammad. British writer Hanif Kureishi called the fatwa "one of the most significant events in postwar literary history".
Background
Even before the publication of The Satanic Verses, the books of Salman Rushdie had stoked controversy. Rushdie saw his role as a writer "as including the function of antagonist to the state".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Satanic Verses controversy” is reaction of Muslims to a 1988 novel. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Satanic, Verses and controversy, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “reaction of Muslims to a 1988 novel” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13404967. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1989, 1998 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Satanic Verses controversy” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.