Still a small but determined group of people did realise what the fatwa meant and supported the novelist whom Ayatollah Khomeini referred to as ‘that blasphemous bastard’.15 The novelist Fay Weldon was sitting opposite Cat Stevens when he made his comments and remarked with amazement that a police chief superintendent who was also in the studio did not simply walk across and arrest the singer for incitement to murder. In a subsequent pamphlet Weldon claimed that Britain was paying the price for the fact that too few people had bothered to read the Koran and had instead been happy to murmur ‘platitudes about “great world religions”’.16 This broadside in turn was viewed by some British Muslims as hate-speech, with even a fairly moderate Muslim writer of the period, Ziauddin Sardar, writing that, ‘It seemed Weldon could fabricate whatever she wished and produce a prejudiced diatribe simply because Muslims were fair game.’17 In fact, it was only people associated with Rushdie who were ‘fair game’. In 1991 Rushdie’s Italian translator was stabbed and beaten up in his apartment in Milan. In 1993 the Norwegian publisher of The Satanic Verses, William Nygaard, was shot three times outside his house in Oslo. In Britain two bookshops were firebombed for stocking the book. Other shops, including a London department store that housed a Penguin bookshop, had bombs planted in them. And in 1989 a young man called Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh blew himself up and destroyed several floors of a London hotel while priming a bomb intended for Rushdie.

There were some people who realised that this was a matter of free speech, in America as well as Europe. For instance, that year’s president of the writer’s group PEN, Susan Sontag, organised an event at which prominent authors would read from Rushdie’s novel: ‘A bit of civic fortitude is what is required here’, as she put it.18 But although there was some civic as well as governmental fortitude, there was barely any wider understanding of what was happening. Broadsides like Weldon’s were highly unusual during the period in realising that Rushdie had not simply had the bad luck to poke a hornet’s nest that happened to be inhabited. He had poked a hornet’s nest that had been recently imported into the country and that was growing. When Hilaire Belloc published The Great Heresies in 1938 he had devoted a chapter to ‘The great and enduring heresy of Mohammed’, a passage that makes The Satanic Verses look tame. But Belloc had not had to escape into hiding or live under police protection for a decade because in the 1930s there were a negligible number of Muslims in Britain. At the time of the Rushdie affair there were just under a million Muslims in the United Kingdom, a number that would treble in the two decades after the affair. Britain was undergoing a crash course in the rules of Islam, just as everybody else was going to have to in the years ahead.