ABSTRACT
The Rushdie affair threw up transnational social spaces that were not altogether diasporic, since they involved affiliations between life-worlds from different national spaces that had nothing in particular to do with earlier national or continental origins. Narrating the Rushdie affair is a problematic undertaking because of the vast number of discourses that intervened in and created it. The Rushdie affair represented an extremely complex “contemporary archaeology” of political practice. The Rushdie affair first arose as a relatively mild phenomenon within British public culture following the publication of The satanic verses by Viking/Penguin in September 1988 and after its shortlisting for the Booker Prize. Sher Azam’s letter is important for its globalization of the real distress felt by Muslims and of Rushdie’s apparent sense of his own power, invoking both the metaphor of conspiracy and the view of a co-ordinated attack on Islam personified in the Westernized symbol of Rushdie himself.
