page_title: The Satanic Verses controversy
section_title: Book sales
hierarchical_section_title: The Satanic Verses controversy / Social and political fallout / Book sales
caption_attribution_description: English: illegal Iranian edition of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, first published in English in 1988. The translator "Roshanak Irani" is an open Pseudonym. The preface, signed by her, refers to the Satanic Verses as a book comparable to the Arabian Nights, a modern epic, a work of magic realism like the novels of Garcia Marquez - indications of a 1990s reading.
context_page_description: The Satanic Verses controversy, also known as the Rushdie Affair, was the heated reaction of Muslims to the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which was first published in the United Kingdom in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief and in 1989 the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted in response to the novel.
  The Iranian government backed the fatwa against Rushdie until 1998, when the succeeding government of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said it no longer supported the killing of Rushdie. However, the fatwa remains in place.
  The issue was said to have divided "Muslims from Westerners along the fault line of culture," and to have pitted a core Western value of freedom of expression—that no one "should be killed, or face a serious threat of being killed, for what they say or write"—against the view of many Muslims—that no one should be free to "insult and malign Muslims" by disparaging the "honour of the Prophet".
context_section_description: Although British bookseller W.H. Smith sold "a mere hundred copies a week of the book in mid-January 1989", it "flew off the shelves" following the fatwa. In America it sold an "unprecedented" five times more copies than the number two book, Star by Danielle Steel, selling more than 750,000 copies of the book by May 1989. B. Dalton, a bookstore chain that decided not to stock the book for security reasons, changed its mind when it found the book "was selling so fast that even as we tried to stop it, it was flying off the shelves". Rushdie earned about $2 million within the first year of the book's publication, and the book is Viking's all-time best seller.
caption: Persian Samizdat edition of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses c.2000
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