ABSTRACT
In January 1989, several hundred Bradford Muslims gathered as copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, published in September 1988, were set alight in front of the town hall. Not long after, British Muslims demonstrated at Hyde Park in central London, petitioned Penguin books to withdraw Rushdie's book and called upon the British government to extend the scope of the blasphemy laws. The protesters felt their demands were justified because of the deep offence that Rushdie's insulting portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad had caused them; their motive was devotion to the Prophet and to Islam. They were not calling for Rushdie's death, and shortly after the Ayatollah Khomeni pronounced a fatwa on Salman Rushdie on 14th February 1989, a number of British Muslim leaders, claiming to represent 90% of the mosques and the majority of Britain's 1.5 million Muslims, publicly dissociated themselves from it 1 . By the autumn of that year, however, the anti-Rushdie campaign had gained considerable momentum; Khomeni's fatwa, best understood in relation to Iranian politics and the politics of the Muslim world, had become a central issue in inter-Muslim rivalry 2 . There is no doubt that these events generated a sense of political crisis in Britain, and a shadow fell upon liberal circles in which multiculturalism was celebrated. This was why some pronounced the Rushdie affair to have been ‘the death of multiculturalism’….
