I t is sometimes difficult to decide which has the more bizarre plot:
Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, or any version a historian might
set down of the spectacular series of events on a national and inter-
national level, linked to the publication of the novel, which has
unfolded in front of us over the last five years and which has come to be
known as "the Rushdie affair." ¹

In the novel, two Indian-born actors fall out of an exploding jumbo
jet over the English Channel, unaccountably surviving to land on the
south coast of England. Pursued by the police as supposed illegal immi-
grants, one of them, Saladin Chamcha, increasingly takes on goatlike
physical characteristics, is granted refuge over a Bangladeshi restaurant
in London and eventually, having recovered his human form, returns to
Bombay to be reconciled with his dying father; the other, Gibreel Far-
ishta, undergoes a psychotic breakdown, during which, amongst other
things, he imagines himself to be the Archangel Gibreel dictating a
Qur'an-like sacred scripture to the founder of a new religion in seventh-
century Arabia, and eventually commits suicide.

Moments in the development of "the Rushdie affair" include: public
demonstrations of anger by many thousands of Muslims from the vari-
ous immigrant communities in Britain (and Canada) shortly after its
publication; demands by governments of several Islamic countries that
the book be banned; riots in India and Pakistan in which a total of
twenty people were killed; the issuing of a fatwah (a formal religious
pronouncement) against Rushdie and his novel by the Ayatollah
Khomeini; repeated offers from organizations in Iran of a bounty for
any Muslim to kill Rushdie, and his going into hiding under police

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