How I Hid Salman Rushdie During the Fatwa

So if the law of blasphemy had extended to Islam, The Satanic Verses would not have infringed it. But even if Salman were tried and acquitted by an Old Bailey jury, I doubt whether the verdict would have made the slightest difference to his enemies: as one Iranian leader put it, the fatwa was not about the book, but “over the West trying to dictate to Islam.” The case, in 1989, was a clear sign of the coming clash, but Western intelligence services did not have the intelligence to analyse it as a precursor to 9/11. The CIA (and Congressman Charlie Wilson) continued to support Bin Laden.

At least the charges against Salman were thrown out and in the UK the case had an even more satisfying result: the government announced that the blasphemy law would not be invoked again for “divisive and damaging litigation.” This repressive crime thereafter became a dead letter and has now been abolished.

Blasphemy has had an inglorious history in Britain, most notably for its use to jail courageous booksellers who stocked Tom Paine’s The Age of Reason in the decades after the American Revolution. They were sentenced to years of hard labor in a disease-ridden prison, the House of Correction. When one already-ill publisher begged the court, “I trust it will not be too great an indulgence if I have a bed,” the Chief Justice retorted, “I cannot order that: The Age of Reason is horrible to the ear of a Christian.” That was more than two hundred years ago—when The Satanic Verses is no longer horrible to the ears of a Muslim, the age of reason may dawn at last.

Geoffrey Robertson is a leading human rights lawyer and author of the Tyrannicide Brief (Anchor Books) and Crimes Against Humanity (The New Press).