The Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah against Salman Rushdie has done great damage to Rushdie’s life. It helped bring an end to his marriage; it has made it difficult for him to arrange meetings with his young son; it has effectively exiled him from India and the city he feels to be his home, Bombay; it has forced him into a constricted existence surrounded by security agents and bodyguards.

There is one element of Rushdie’s life that the fatwah has not harmed, however, and that is his literary reputation. The implication seems to be that if people are willing to kill a writer for his expressed views, those views, and the way they are expressed, must therefore be of supreme importance. As Rushdie himself said, “I get treated more seriously as a writer in Iran than I do here.” That is no longer the case: The Satanic Verses, a book of questionable merits, was accorded automatic dignity and stature by the political furor it aroused. Rushdie, at the time of its publication just one of several fortyish English writers (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Angela Carter, among others) who seemed to be neck and neck in their generation’s competition for Great English Novelist, suddenly pulled far ahead of the pack and achieved the status of an oracle. Henceforth everything he wrote would be treated as ex cathedrautterances from a more or less infallible source rather than as mere—or even excellent—novels. It seems to be held that to criticize