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Rushdie, who grew up in a hillside villa in Bombay, in a secular Muslim family, began his writing career in London after studying at Cambridge. The Satanic Verses was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988. But the critical praise it received was overshadowed by the outbreak of fury that swept not only Kashmir and Islamabad, where riots broke out, but Bolton, Bradford, Oldham and London, where marches and book burnings were held. Rushdie did not anticipate the extent of the furore. “I expected a few mullahs would be offended,” he said later. His publisher, Viking Penguin, cannot have foreseen it either. Dr Stott believes things would be different now.
“If [Rushdie] were to write The Satanic Verses today rather than in 1988, he would really struggle to get a publisher,” he says. “I think publishers would be scared.”
Not without good reason, perhaps. In 2008, the London headquarters of the publisher Gibson Square was firebombed after the firm announced it was to publish a controversial novel, The Jewel of Medina. The book, by Sherry Jones, gives a fictionalised account of the life of Aisha, one of the Prophet Mohammed’s wives.
But the threat to free speech extends beyond the literary world, Dr Stott notes, pointing to the case of the teacher at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire who received death threats after showing students a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in 2021. He was put into police protection following the incident, which sparked days of demonstrations at the school gates, and has been in hiding ever since.
“Yes, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since [the late 1980s] but I’d argue things have probably got worse,” says Dr Stott. “Generally with freedom of speech in the UK, things have worsened, with people losing their jobs for things they’ve said. The encouraging thing is there has also been a bit of a fightback. Free speech as an issue is more high profile.”
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