The Satanic Verses Controversy: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

On 26 September 1988 Viking/Penguin published in the United Kingdom The. Satanic Verses., a new novel by Salman Rushdie.¹. The novel was keenly awaited in the literary world where Rushdie was regarded as among the most inventive and ambitious novelists of his generation. He had already won the Booker Prize, probably the most prestigious literary award in Britain, for his second published novel Midnight’s Children., in 1981.². His subsequent novel, Shame., was also short-listed for the prize, though to Rushdie’s undisguised dismay it did not win, and he was internationally recognised as a novelist of the first importance.³. However, Rushdie was also a controversial writer — both his novels and his essays and critical writings had generated heated debate — and even before it was published it was known that the new novel would create more than a literary stir, though the extent of the controversy it eventually provoked could not have been anticipated by anyone.