"In Leicester, Faiyazuddin Ahmad, a jovial-looking man, got to work, photocopying extracts of the book and sending them around to Muslim organizations and to the embassies of forty-five Muslim countries in the UK. A recent arrival in the country, Ahmad had previously worked in East Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as a managing editor of newspapers, and was now at the Islamic Foundation in Leicester, a local chapter of the Pakistani Jamaat-e Islami, which received funding from Saudi Arabia. Ahmad, who also had ties with the Saudi-funded World Assembly of Muslim Youth, traveled to Jeddah in October to brief members of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. At the Saudi embassy in London, the head of the Islamic affairs section, Mughram al-Ghamdi, helped set up the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs to campaign against the book and get it banned. Only a few Muslim countries answered the call. But by December, British Muslims were protesting, burning a copy as they marched through the small town of Bolton. The subcontinental rivalry between Deobandis and Barelvis was mirrored in the Muslim community in Britain, fueling a competition for bigger and bigger protests. A month later, in January 1989, a larger one took place in Bradford, just an hour away from Bolton. The anger rippled back to the subcontinent. Not to be outdone, the Jamaat organized its own demonstration in Islamabad on February 12, bringing a massive crowd to protest outside the US cultural center in Islamabad. More than eighty were injured, five were shot dead."
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Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses
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The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses (1988) is the fourth novel of British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie. The book was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts
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