The teeth-sucking pundits who tell us to remember that moral issues are complicated and we must always look for shades of grey are usually right. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie was an exception: the simplest moral question of my lifetime. On Valentine's Day 1989, a dying theocrat diverted attention from his military and political failures by ordering the murder of a citizen of a foreign country for writing a novel. The Rushdie Affair became the Dreyfus Affair of our age because it revealed how, when faced with such extreme provocation, ordinary political categories collapse. Whatever your opinions, if you supported Rushdie, you supported the freedom to write, read and publish what you liked, even when (I would say especially when) books were being burned and death threats issued not in some far away and forgettable dictatorship but in your own land. You supported the rule of law, for Rushdie had committed no crime, and placed the right of the individual to express him or herself above the rights of the collective. The enemies of Dreyfus said that they must keep an innocent man in prison to protect the collective honour of the French army and French state. The enemies of Rushdie said that the Ayatollah Khomeini's incitement to murder was understandable or excusable because it protected the collective honour of Muslims. No one who professed a belief in freedom of conscience and thought could hesitate for a moment before taking Rushdie's side. As it turned out, those who shouted the loudest hesitated the      longest.

Rushdie writes that he "learned how to withstand the Islamic attacks on him; it was after all not surprising that fanatics and bigots behaved like bigots and fanatics." Non-Muslim critics were harder to endure. Most came from the Right, or at least at first. Margaret Thatcher said she understood the insult to Islam. Norman Tebbit described Rushdie as "an outstanding villain". Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roald Dahl, Richard Ingrams and Auberon Waugh behaved as disgracefully as one would expect. Daily Mail journalists deplored and pursued a man who put his life on the line for the freedoms that made them a comfortable living. At one point Rushdie describes watching the news at a secret address, when the pudgy face of Geoffrey Howe popped up on the screen. Howe tried to placate fanaticism by pretending that as well as insulting Islam, Rushdie had insulted Britain by comparing it to Nazi Germany. "Where?" shouted Rushdie at his television. "On what page? Show me where I did that?"

The Right's animosity was understandable if not forgivable. Rushdie was a leftist, and an immigrant leftist to boot. He had supported the Nicaraguan revolution and been active in the anti-racist movements of the 1980s. Conservatives claimed that the slippery foreigner "knew what he was doing". Rushdie deliberately insulted Islam because he wanted to make money from the controversy. They then used the costs of the Special Branch protection the ungrateful migrant had forced on the taxpayer to create a caricature from Tory fantasy. Rushdie was a highbrow scrounger, a champagne socialist, who collected his royalties while milking the public purse. When a snide Prince Charles joined the hostile chorus, Ian McEwan said that His Royal Highness's security cost far more than Rushdie's even though the prince "had never written anything worth reading". Understandably, Rushdie was more outraged than amused. It took him four years to write The Satanic Verses. Did his opponents not find it strange that a serious writer would spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an insult? But of course, his enemies could not accept that he was a serious writer. "In order to attack him and his work, it was necessary to paint him as a bad person, an apostate traitor, an unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist whose work was without merit, who ‘attacked Islam' for his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much-repeated phrase he did it on purpose."

Like Howe, the Conservative grandees of the day had not read the book, any more than the most thuggish and philistine demonstrators on the streets of Bradford or Tehran had. They neither knew nor cared that the satire of the founding myths of Islam was a small part of a whirling narrative about the traumas of migration from West to East, traumas which the reader cannot help but notice all but did for Rushdie.