13 - Fiction, Religion and Freedom of Speech, from ‘The Rushdie Affair’ to 7/7

Summary

The controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) brought the public function of the contemporary British novel as a form of mass communication and the cultural values it represented into sharp focus. Champions of The Satanic Verses typically defended the publication of the novel as a sign of British democratic values, particularly the author’s right to free speech, even if that speech was felt to be offensive or blasphemous. Critics of the novel typically pointed to the ways in which it denigrates Islam by rehearsing Orientalist stereotypes of the Prophet and the Qur’an. The public burning of copies of Rushdie’s novel and the injunction issued by the religious leader of Iran, Ayotollah Khomeini, on 14 February 1989 called on Muslims around the world to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and his associates. Such an injunction clearly exemplifies the strength of feeling which the novel generated. This response may seem surprising when one considers that The Satanic Verses seemed to exemplify the postmodern turn in contemporary fiction, a move which celebrated the crisis of representation, the so-called waning of affect or feeling, and made a virtue out of blurring the boundaries between fiction and the real. Yet the Rushdie affair clearly demonstrates how the printed form of the contemporary novel and its mass circulation in the global public sphere produces strong and powerful feelings among different reception cultures.