The Satanic Verses: SALMAN RUSHDIE.

• Author: Wolfe, Liz

The fallout from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) was even more bizarre and terrifying than the novel's opening sequence, in which a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain explodes over the English Channel and the two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin, are transformed into an archangel and devil, respectively.

While Gibreel--who has been transformed into the archangel Gabriel--falls into the Atlantic, he has several dreams, including one about an alternate-universe founding of Islam by a man named Mahound. (Mahound, another name for Muhammad, was used by Christians in the Middle Ages.) In these visions, the emerging religion allows the worship of several goddesses, and doubt is cast on the divine nature of the prophet's words. Rushdie went so far as to name the book's prostitute characters after Muhammad's wives.

Readers later learn that these visions were sent by the devil. But the fun house-mirror image of Islam nevertheless angered much of the Muslim world. In 1989, Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the author and those involved in the book's publication to be put to death. Clerics and government officials were, in essence, instructing Muslims to hunt and kill Rushdie, with Islamic organizations closely aligned with the government placing a $2.5 million bounty on his head.

The consequences were grim. Rushdie was put under police protection at his home in the United Kingdom for the better part of a decade. Hitoshi Igarashi, a Japanese...