‘The Satanic Verses’: Declassified letters show UK’s uncomfortable position on controversial book

Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is famous for his forthright statements to other world leaders. In March 1989, Mahathir wrote a letter to then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that was blunt even by his standards. Unlike a lot of his angry letters, this one wasn’t published.

Mahathir’s letter was about Salman Rushdie’s controversial book, The Satanic Verses. He wrote: “I do not think I am a Muslim fanatic. Yet I find I cannot condone the writings of Salman Rushdie in his book […] And I find the attitude of the ‘Western Democracies’ most patronising, arrogant and insensitive.”

In 2019, the UK government declassified many of its Foreign and Commonwealth Office files on the diplomatic upheaval over the novel. Mahathir’s letter to Thatcher is one of hundreds of unpublished diplomatic documents I have seen in visits to the UK National Archives since then.

My full analysis of this letter, and Thatcher’s response to it, has just been published in the Review of International Studies. It is part of a larger project I am working on about The Satanic Verses crisis and what it tells us about the place of religion in international relations.

‘Strange’, ‘rare’ crisis

The Satanic Verses, published in late 1988, was met with protests throughout the Muslim world, beginning in South Asian communities in Britain....

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