And thereafter countless other political and intellectual opponents were to lose their lives on Khomeini's command. Chatwin's memorial service was to be Rushdie's last public appearance for some time. He spent the remainder of that day searching for his son, Zafar, then he went into hiding. Apparently a tabloid reporter happened to be in the next room, conducting an adulterous affair, and missed the biggest story of the year.
It's very hard to be offended by The Satanic Verses - it requires a long period of intense reading. It's a quarter of a million words. Four days after Rushdie received his "unfunny Valentine", he issued an apology: "I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam. So much for the spirit of forgiveness. What the mixed responses pointed to was that, right from the start, The Satanic Verses affair was less a theological dispute than an opportunity to exert political leverage.
The background to the controversy was the struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran to be the standard bearer of global Islam. The Saudis had spent a great deal of money exporting the fundamentalist or Salafi version of Sunni Islam, while Shiite Iran, still smarting from a calamitous war and humiliating armistice with Iraq, was keen to reassert its credentials as the vanguard of the Islamic revolution. Both the Saudis and Iranians saw a new constituency, ripe for exploitation, in the small British protest groups that initially responded to The Satanic Verses with book-burning demonstrations.
But in fact the protesters who took to the streets in Bradford and other mill towns were themselves the offspring of other far-off theocratic politics in the subcontinent. The Satanic Verses was published on 26 September and, after pressure from the Janata party, banned in India by Rajiv Gandhi's government nine days later.
Flushed with this success, Indians working for the Saudi-financed Islamic Foundation of Leicester suggested trying to get the book banned in Britain. A journalist-cum-theologian, Maududi preached that "for the entire human race, there is only one way of life which is Right in the eyes of God and that is al-Islam".
Sacranie famously opined that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy" for Rushdie. He was later knighted for services to community relations. And it was the Saudi clerics who were planning a trial of Rushdie in absentia. It was even reviewed in an Iranian newspaper. But noticing the protests in India and Britain, a delegation of mullahs from the holy city of Qum read a section of the book to Khomeini, including the part featuring a mad imam in exile, which was an obvious caricature of Khomeini.
As one British diplomat in Iran said: "It was designed to send the old boy incandescent. As Khomeini put it in a speech nine days after the fatwa, The Satanic Verses was very important to what he called the "world devourers" because they had mobilised the "entire Zionism and arrogance behind it". The book, he went on, was a "calculated" attack by "colonialism" on the greatness and honour of the clergy.
It's worth noting here that the book, written by an arch anti-colonialist, was indeed in part an attack, or at least satire, on the role of the clergy, the caste of priests that has no Qur'anic authority. In this newspaper, just before the fatwa, Rushdie had written: "A powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. The next decade was a dangerous and isolating time for Rushdie.
He was shadowed round-the-clock by bodyguards, and moved each time the security services became aware of one of the series of plots to kill him. Because there were British hostages held by Islamic extremists in Lebanon, Rushdie was advised by the authorities not to say or do anything that might antagonise their captors.
Politicians remained at a safe public distance from him. Travel, once the driver of his imagination, had become a logistical and administrative nightmare. The subcontinent was ruled out. British Airways told him not to fly with them because it might endanger their staff. And when he did manage to go abroad, staying with friends was a cramped affair. As Christopher Hitchens, an old friend and staunch advocate, recently recalled of a Rushdie visit to Washington DC: "When he was staying at my house back at Thanksgiving of , so were about a dozen heavily armed members of the United States's finest anti-terrorist forces.
The years following the fatwa were also a damaging and sometimes lethal period for many of those associated with The Satanic Verses, few of whom had any protection. In April Collets, the left-wing bookshop, and Dillons were firebombed for stocking the Rushdie novel. Unexploded devices were also discovered at the Nottingham, Guildford and Peterborough branches of the store. In August the same year Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh accidentally blew himself up in a Paddington hotel room while priming a bomb intended to kill Rushdie.
Meanwhile Rushdie's marriage to the American author Marianne Wiggins did not long survive the pressures of life in hiding. Rushdie was at a low ebb and writing very little.
Amis wrote: "I often tell him that if the Rushdie Affair were, for instance, the Amis Affair, then I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquillised pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs, and covered in blotches and burns from various misadventures with the syringe and the crackpipe. Rushdie sought another way out. On Christmas Eve he issued a statement bearing witness that "there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his last prophet".
Claiming to have renewed his faith in Islam, he said he did not agree with any character in The Satanic Verses who "casts aspersions He also said he would not release a paperback of the book. That evening he was so disgusted with himself that he was physically sick. The name Mahound was used in medieval Christian plays to represent satanic figures, and some Muslims concluded that Rushdie was implying that Mohammed was a false prophet. The resulting anger led to bookshop bombings, burnings and bans on the novel in much of the Islamic world.
Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, even issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie - forcing the writer to go into hiding for almost a decade. The controversy surrounding the novel also sparked a cultural war in Britain between those who considered the book blasphemous and called for it to be banned, and those who defended it as an expression of freedom of speech, says the i news site.
The most important questions posed by Azhar in the documentary surround free or limited speech, says The Guardian. The Salafi school of thought Alyas became part of is more puritanical than traditional South Asian Islam, and has overt political leanings. Some of the people Alyas associated with ended up fighting in Bosnia, as members of the Bosnian army. He never made it to the battlefield, he says because his skills "were in promoting ideology". Today, Alyas has softened his approach. With or against.
Halal or haram. Now I prefer shades of grey," he says. He remains a devout Muslim who champions "the middle way". He is an unconventional imam and psychologist. He offers his congregations in Huddersfield and Bradford advice on everything from sex and relationships to mental health.
Still at school, he was excited when his father took him to Hyde Park to protest against the book. The demonstration saw coachloads of Muslims travel from Glasgow, Bradford, Birmingham and elsewhere - altogether about 20, arrived. Communal prayers, which had mostly been reserved for within the mosque, were now taking place in London's public places. Effigies of Rushdie were burnt and placards threatening violence were common. At home, Ed's father told him they weren't "that kind of Muslim" but the protest had piqued Ed's interest.
He began to attend East London Mosque without his father and was inspired by English-speaking imams who were happy to talk politics. Salman Rushdie was a hero for Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, then a journalist on the New Statesman - not only for his writing but also because he had spoken publicly about racism in Britain.
So she read the book. I'm not that kind of Muslim but I did wonder, 'Why are you doing this? When Muslims started burning the book, many of Yasmin's white friends were disgusted. In turn, Muhammed repeated the words to his followers. These words were eventually written down and became the verses and chapters of the Quran. One of the main characters, Gibreel Farishta, has a series of dreams in which he becomes his namesake, the angel Gibreel. Rushdie chooses a provocative name for Muhammed.
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