I know most of you were too busy yesterday celebrating the orthodox feastday of Saint Brigid of Kildare to think of anything else, but it was also the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.

Back then Rushdie was already a literary hotshot, having won the Booker in 1981 for his second novel, Midnight’s Children. This was long before Padma, when Rushdie was newly married to Marianne Wiggins and could walk down the street without being recognized.

However, it was the 1988 publication of The Satanic Verses that really put him on the map, making him both notorious and a cause celebre all over the world, granting him immortality while putting his own body and that of others into mortal peril.

Although Rushdie had always courted controversy, having mocked Indira Gandhi, the Bhutto family, and American foreign policy in previous books, he claims that he had no idea what a hornet’s nest The Satanic Verses would stir up:

Rushdie … said “I expected a few mullahs would be offended, call me names, and then I could defend myself in public… I honestly never expected anything like this.” [link]

Instead the book was banned within a month in India, followed by Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore and lastly Venezuela in June 1989. A large number of threats were made to bookstores in the US and UK. Daniel Pipes claims that “[t]he bombings meant that hardly a single bookstore sold Rushdie’s novel openly in the UK” [link]

When the fatwa was issued on February 14th 1989, fewer than six months after the book was published, Rushdie tried to defuse the situation by issuing an apology which was rejected, with Khomeini saying that Rushdie had put himself beyond redeption, no matter what else he did in the rest of his life. Rushdie had to go into hiding for nine years, protected by the very same British government he had been antagonistic towards.

A less violent attempt to suppress his writing was also employed — he was sued for blasphemy in the UK, but saved by the fact that he had mocked Mohammed and not Jesus:

Some Muslims began a private prosecution against Rushdie and Penguin for the ancient crime of blasphemous libel. The magistrate refused to issue the summons on the curious but correct ground that it was only a crime to blaspheme against Christianity. [link]

After nine years, and a change of government in Iran, Rushdie was in effect decriminalized even if he wasn’t fully legalized:

Mr. Rushdie has, obviously, now survived two decades under the threat of death — which was eased, but not completely erased in 1998, when the government of Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s reformist president, announced that it had no intention of enforcing or helping anyone to enforce the fatwa. While he now lives openly in New York, after years in hiding, the Iranian news agency IRNA reported this week that the fatwa does, in fact, remain in effect. [link]

individuals still send him a “sort of Valentine’s card” each year reminding him of the edict [link]

[however] “It’s reached the point where it’s a piece of rhetoric rather than a real threat,” Rushdie said. [link]

Net, the fatwa backfired, turning Rushdie into a (living) martyr for free speech, granting him both knighthood and sainthood, elevating him rather than destroying him. That said, it has had a chilling effect as intended, with publishers now far less likely to publish a book like The Satantic Verses than they were two decades ago.

Update: Comments were meant to be closed on this post. Not because the comments received were not good — they were great — but because a post like this is likely to attract trolls and I have no intention of spending Sunday moderating discussion. I just wanted to commemorate a very important occasion.