Author(s): Kenan Malik

Current Affairs & Politics

'A gripping account of how we went from burning books to bombs on buses. The Rushdie affair has shaped all our lives. This book shows us how.'Hanif Kureishi
In 1989 a thousand Muslim protesters paraded through a British city displaying a copy of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, before ceremoniously burning the book. It was an act motivated by rage and offence as well as one calculated to shock and offend. It did more than that: images of the burning book became an icon of the Muslim anger.Printed and broadcast in dozens of countries, these images of protest announced the birth of a new world.
Twenty years later, the questions raised by the 'Rushdie Affair' - of Islam's relationship to the West, the meaning and value of multiculturalism, the limits of tolerance in a liberal society - have become defining issues of our time. Taking the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning Rushdie as his starting point, Kenan Malik examines how radical Islam gained hold in Muslim communities, how multiculturalism contributed to this process, and how the Rushdie affair transformed the very nature of the debate on tolerance and free speech.It is an original and vividly insightful account of one of the major historical punctuation marks of the last twenty-five years.