The right to dissent

Even before Ayatollah Khomeini deemed The Satanic Verses so blasphemous that he issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for Sir Salman Rushdie to be murdered, the author had been defiant. “I cannot censor. I write whatever there is to write,” he said before the novel’s publication. It was banned first in India and in much of the Middle East. The writer was forced into hiding for more than a decade. But that ordeal never changed his view that artists had the right to offend and to seed “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history”.

The Satanic Verses is laced with often comic magical realism. Iran’s supreme leader is parodied. So what? No piece of writing deserves a death sentence or should be met with the threat of assault.

Writers can be questioned about why they chose the words they did or chose to frame their ideas in the way they did. They can be criticised for being far removed from the subjects they mock – or challenge. But when writers face violent intimidation from states or their proxies, or deluded followers of religious orthodoxies, they deserve our wholehearted support.

Stories can be twisted in the service of religious or political absolutism, but Rushdie showed they are also powerful weapons in the hands of those seeking to refute such oppressive ways of seeing the world.