The Rushdie Affair and the Politics of Multicultural Britain

Abstract

It is more than thirty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the execution of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose third novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988. But the ‘Rushdie Affair’ has yet to be subject to a sustained analysis by historians. Journalists and political scientists continue to focus on the fatwa, despite the fact the protests against the novel in Britain – where The Satanic Verses is primarily set – predated Khomeini’s decree by two months. This article fills this lacuna by shifting attention onto the emergence of the campaign against The Satanic Verses in Britain and in Bradford especially, where a copy of Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel was infamously burnt by Muslim protestors. It shows how an earlier set of campaigns fought in Bradford by Muslim activists paved the way for the city to become a key site of protest against both Rushdie and his novel. The protests that greeted The Satanic Verses were shaped by the contradictory nature of Britain’s emergence as a multicultural society, I argue, and the political complexities thrown up by the hybridized milieu Rushdie had sought to use his fiction to evoke.