ABSTRACT
Opinion falls into two camps on the question of Rushdie's culpability. Some blame him for the controversy, arguing that he knew he was stirring up a hornet's nest, and that he chose to do so for his own aggrandizement or profit. Rushdie's exquisite awareness of religion and censorship meant that he knew that writers dealing with religious subjects routinely get into trouble in the Middle East. The key point in Rushdie's defense is that the response to his book was arbitrary in nature; therefore, he could not possibly have anticipated the furor it would arouse. The twenty-year near-silence about Mu‘ammar al-Qadhdhafi makes the quick response to Rushdie appear unpredictable, even capricious. Some Muslims have done more than Rushdie and been punished less; others have done less and been punished more. Muslims themselves have written books in Arabic, Turkish and Persian that challenged Islam more than The Satanic Verses.
