Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses – which led to a fatwa threatening his life, forcing him into hiding for a decade – has finally returned to bookshops in India, the land of his birth.
The novel, inspired by the life of the prophet Muhammad, became the focus of a fierce worldwide debate over freedom of speech when Iran’s then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, placed a bounty on Rushdie’s head due to its supposed blasphemy. The book was banned in India by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1988 after riots erupted over its contents.
Two years ago, many years after Iran distanced itself from the fatwa and Rushdie had come out of hiding, the author was critically injured and lost an eye when he was stabbed at an event in upstate New York. Hadi Matar, 26, has been charged with second degree attempted murder. A separate federal indictment charges him with terrorism.
The reappearance of The Satanic Verses in Indian bookstores has nothing to do with freedom of speech, however, but missing paperwork. The original government order banning the book’s import could not be found in India’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, leading to its overturning. Last month, Delhi’s high court ruled: “We have no other option except to presume that no such notification exists.”
Bahrisons Booksellers, a long-established family-run book retailer in New Delhi’s Khan Market, announced the book’s availability in a post on the social media platform X. “The Satanic Verses is now in stock,” the post read. A store manager, who declined to be named, said sales “have been very good”, despite a price tag of 1,999 rupees (about £19), hefty by Indian standards. “We’re selling out,” he said on Thursday.
Manasi Subramaniam, the editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House India, the book’s publisher, also took to X to quote Rushdie. “‘Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true.’ At long last, @SalmanRushdie’s The Satanic Verses is allowed to be sold in India,” she wrote.
Some readers expressed curiosity about the book’s reputation. “I’ve heard The Satanic Verses spoken about all my life. I wanted to read it out of curiosity,” said Dilip Sharma, a 22-year-old English major who planned to buy a copy. “It feels unreal to see it in the bookstore because it’s like seeing the unicorn you’ve been hearing about all your life.”
However, the return of The Satanic Verses has provoked anger among some Muslim organisations which have called for the ban to be reinstated, arguing that the novel “insults” Islamic beliefs and threatens social harmony in a country where 14% of the population is Muslim.
“No Muslim can tolerate seeing this hateful book on any bookstore shelf,” said Maulana Mufti Shahabuddin Razvi Barelvi, the national president of the All India Muslim Jamaat. Rushdie, who holds US-British citizenship and was knighted in 2007, has consistently maintained that The Satanic Verses is a work of fiction and contains nothing offensive.
