Rushdie’s novels began charting this new terrain, capturing that sense of displacement. It was a dislocation whose consequences we are confronting even now in the unstitching of politics. The 1980s was a decade that saw the beginnings of the breakdown of traditional political and moral boundaries and the creation of new social terrains for which there was as yet no map or compass. He could equally have been describing the way the conflict over his novel created its own monsters. Rushdie was writing of how racism demonises its Others. “They have the power to describe,” comes the reply, “and we succumb to the pictures they construct.” The inmates have all been turned into monsters. There’s a scene in The Satanic Verses in which one of the characters, Saladin Chamcha, is incarcerated in an immigration detention centre.

The significance of the confrontation, however, as Azhar deftly draws out, lay less in what Rushdie wrote than in what the novel came to symbolise. It is, in fact, a dense exploration of the migrant experience, as savage in its indictment of racism as of religion. The danger in looking at The Satanic Verses through the lens of the “Rushdie affair” is that the novel comes to be seen simply as a fictionalised assault on Islam.

Photograph: Terry Smith/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against him on 14 February 1989. And, like Azhar in his documentary, I’ve spent much of my life mulling over that shift and its consequences. Friends who were as irreligious and leftwing as I was, but who now celebrated book-burnings and chanted “death to Rushdie”. I lost many friends over the Rushdie affair. I am of the generation that came of age just before The Satanic Verses, a generation that was largely secular and as fierce in our condemnation of religious constraints as of racist bigotry. It’s been a ghostly presence in my life, too. He returned to his Huddersfield primary school, remembering, with a nervous laugh, playground games of “How do we kill Rushdie?” The Satanic Verses was a “spectre” that hung over his life then, he observed, and still haunts Muslims. Azhar was a child at the time of the fatwa. The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On, presented by the broadcaster Mobeen Azhar, was an intelligent, subtle exploration of the impact of the Rushdie affair on Britain’s Muslim communities. Even in today’s censorious, don’t-give-offence climate, there is something startling in the casualness with which the associate editor of a national newspaper can proudly proclaim himself a would-be book-burner and book-banner.

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