![]() ![]() Photograph: Terry Smith/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against him on 14 February 1989. And, like Azhar in his documentary, I’ve spent much of my life mulling over that shift and its consequences. Friends who were as irreligious and leftwing as I was, but who now celebrated book-burnings and chanted “death to Rushdie”. I lost many friends over the Rushdie affair. I am of the generation that came of age just before The Satanic Verses, a generation that was largely secular and as fierce in our condemnation of religious constraints as of racist bigotry. ![]() It’s been a ghostly presence in my life, too. He returned to his Huddersfield primary school, remembering, with a nervous laugh, playground games of “How do we kill Rushdie?” The Satanic Verses was a “spectre” that hung over his life then, he observed, and still haunts Muslims. Azhar was a child at the time of the fatwa. The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On, presented by the broadcaster Mobeen Azhar, was an intelligent, subtle exploration of the impact of the Rushdie affair on Britain’s Muslim communities. Even in today’s censorious, don’t-give-offence climate, there is something startling in the casualness with which the associate editor of a national newspaper can proudly proclaim himself a would-be book-burner and book-banner. ![]()
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