The Rushdie Affair – Blasphemous Rumours

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 10 July 2024

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The final episode of season five covers the Rushdie Affair. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie made The Satanic Verses the most famous novel in the world — for all the wrong reasons. The controversy had far-reaching implications for free speech, international relations and the political identity of British Muslims. Although the issue seemed to have been resolved in 1998, the attempted murder of Rushdie in 2022 showed that it was far from over. Dorian and Ian tell the whole story from all angles: Rushdie’s decade in hiding, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia, community relations in Britain, divisions in the literary scene, and the conflicted responses of politicians around the world. What exactly did The Satanic Verses say that made people so angry? Which public figures were on Rushdie’s side and which ones thought he had it coming? How did Rushdie get his life back, only to almost lose it decades later? And what is the cultural and political legacy of the affair today? It is a tale of artistic freedom colliding with religious dogma and political calculations to turn a work of fiction into an international incident for the first time. Reading list Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007) Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010) Daniel Pipes – The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990) Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses (1988) Salman Rushdie – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991) Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton (2012) Salman Rushdie – Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024) Articles John Cunningham – ‘Sentenced to the prison of the word’, The Guardian (1990) Will Lloyd – How We Gave Up on Salman Rushdie, UnHerd (2022) Dorian Lynskey – Salman Rushdie on Quichotte: “The world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end” the i (2019) Sean O’Grady – The Satanic Verses 30 Years On review, The Independent (2019) David Remnick – The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, New Yorker (2023) Salman Rushdie – The Disappeared, New Yorker (2012) Words for Salman Rushdie – New York Times (1989) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to origin story. In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history,
0:14.3	explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today. I'm Dorian
0:19.6	Linsky, author of the Ministry of Truth,
0:21.1	and everything must go. And I'm Ian Dunt, and I am economist for the Iron newspaper and the author
0:24.9	of How Westminster Works to Work and Why It Doesn't. For this last episode of Season 5, we are discussing
0:30.1	the Rushdie affair, the controversy around Simon Rushdie's 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses,
0:35.3	the fatwa against his life, all the way up to the attempted
0:38.8	assassination in 2022. Ian, why are you so interested in this story? Well, first of all, because
0:46.5	it's sort of a story that's been going on throughout most of my life when I've been conscious
0:51.1	of politics, and it's still happening now. I mean, in September, the trial will take place for the man accused of the attempted murder. But more importantly,
0:58.5	I think it brings together some of the core themes, not just of this podcast, but basically
1:03.6	of world politics, as we see it. The first is the kind of decline in standards of protecting
1:08.2	free speech and our commitment to those ideas. And the second is
1:12.0	slightly weirder, I think. And it's this idea that's been around for a while now of a clash of
1:17.2	civilizations between the West and Islam, which obviously was put on kind of rocket fuel after
1:23.4	September the 11th and has now been taken up eagerly by populists in the US, in Europe, in the UK,
1:30.3	this process by which Islam is taken from being this really quite diverse culture and way of life
1:36.7	to suddenly being homogenized into its most reactionary, most authoritarian version. And that process,
1:43.8	and of course the liberal response to that,
1:45.5	which is to think, oh my God, well, hang on a minute,
1:47.0	how do we deal with this culture that is apparently just trying to burn books
1:49.9	and execute writers?
	...

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