"The author of The Satanic Verses, the British Indian writer Salman Rushdie, was already the acclaimed winner of the 1981 Booker Prize. The Satanic Verses was his fourth book, published in September 1988, about two Indian Muslim immigrants to Britain who die on a hijacked plane that explodes over the English Channel. They fall to earth and are magically transformed into living symbols of good and evil. Their stories are intertwined with that of a prophet called Mahound, in a place called jahiliyya. Rushdie described the book as a work about “migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London, and Bombay.” Muslims saw references to their prophet Muhammad and his wives, whose names were given to prostitutes in the book. Khomeini’s edict to kill Rushdie sent shock waves through the literary and publishing world. That same night, Rushdie got police protection and went into hiding. Khomeini had become the spokesperson of Muslims who felt aggrieved and slighted, even those who had not read The Satanic Verses. Six hundred pages and a quarter of a million words long, the book may have been a masterpiece, but it was a maze. Yet someone had gone through it very diligently in India, Rushdie’s native country. And within a month of publication of The Satanic Verses, in the fall of 1988, he had called a friend in Leicester, telling him there was a campaign to ban the book in India, urging him to do God’s work in the UK."