Salman Rushdie
Novelist; author of The Satanic Verses
Rushdie’s magical-realist novel was read by many Muslims as blasphemous mockery of the Prophet and by the literary world as protected fiction — a clash escalated by Khomeini’s 1989 death fatwa and, decades later, a near-fatal 2022 stabbing.
What happened
The Satanic Verses (1988) includes dream sequences loosely based on early Islamic history and a brothel whose workers take the names of the Prophet’s wives. Protests and bans spread across the Muslim world. On 14 February 1989 Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The verdicts below score the novel — the fatwa and later violence are condemned across every framework.
“I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of… The Satanic Verses… [is] sentenced to death.” (Khomeini’s fatwa — itself condemned universally.)
Under each definition
A work of literary fiction engaging Islamic history is criticism/imagination about belief, not racism against Muslims as people.
Most read a novel as protected art; some argue its use of sacred names was aimed at “Muslimness” rather than ideas.
Content “in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran” is, by this frame, insult to Islam.
Fiction — however offensive — is paradigmatically protected expression.
Who called it Islamophobic
Khomeini and many Muslims worldwide held that the novel was a calculated insult to the Prophet and the Qur’an.
The defense
Rushdie and the international literary community defended the book as fiction and freedom of imagination.
Outcome
Rushdie went into hiding for roughly a decade; translators and publishers were attacked (his Japanese translator was murdered in 1991). In 2022 he was stabbed and blinded in one eye at a New York lecture; his attacker was convicted in 2025.
In their words
I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses… [is] sentenced to death.
The argument at the heart of the anti-Rushdie case — that it is morally unacceptable to cause offence to other cultures — is now widely accepted.
The verdicts above are how each framework would most likely treat this case — illustrative guidance, not official rulings. The frameworks diverge most on speech and ideas: the OIC “defamation of religion” lens and the secular/free-speech position often reach opposite conclusions on the same act. See the Definition tab for each framework’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.