Thanks to the protection measures put around Rushdie by the British government, he survived the Satanic Verses affair. But as the author Kenan Malik put it much later, society as a whole – and the publishing industry in particular – internalised the fatwa.19 Things that were published before 1989 would not be published again. The assassin’s veto took over and soon it was not only novels that might be critical of Islam but even fawningly uncritical novels that became unpublishable. In 2008 security concerns persuaded the same British publishers that had published Rushdie’s novel to withdraw from publishing a work of romance about the founder of Islam called The Jewel of Medina. A small independent publisher in London that picked up the novel to make a point against censorship was subsequently firebombed by three British Muslims.

Apart from making a society internalise the threat of violence the Rushdie affair had another important effect in Britain. It embedded the idea of ‘community politics’ along faith-based lines, because as soon as thousands of angry Muslims appeared on British streets the question arose of who spoke for these people. In Britain the Rushdie affair created the first organised Muslim ‘representative’ organisation. The UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs (UKACIA) was put together as a direct effort to coordinate anger about, and preclude any repeat of, the Satanic Verses affair. In the years afterwards this led to the creation of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the largest umbrella group claiming to represent British Muslims. The organisation was not only political but sectarian. Although the group was financially supported by Saudi Arabia, then vying with Iran to be the dominant Muslim power, it was dominated by people from the Pakistani Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. The creation of such an entity obviously benefited those who were almost overnight promoted from obscurity into positions as ‘community spokesmen’ (always men). It also benefited their own hardline branch of Islam, with each apparent or actual escalation of the crisis strengthening their hand and sidelining more liberal and independent elements within the community.20

In the short term the creation of such groups appeared useful for government. As Henry Kissinger reportedly asked, ‘What number do I dial to get Europe?’, so the British government in the wake of the Rushdie crisis asked, ‘What number do I dial to get the Muslim community?’ Those who claim this was a familiar brand of left-wing politics forget that in Britain it was a Conservative Home Secretary – Michael Howard – who encouraged the creation of the MCB and made it into the interlocutory group for the government. The alleged success of the model meant that it was exported across other Western countries, where even France – despite its traditions – chose to encourage representative bodies for French Muslims, notably the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM). In France, as in Britain, this was the creation of a right-wing government and one right-wing politician in particular – Nicolas Sarkozy.