‘Whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses.” So insists Salman Rushdie in Knife, his “Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, written after he almost lost his life in a ferocious assault in Chautauqua, a small town in upstate New York, where he had gone to give a talk in August 2022.

As Rushdie rose to speak, a young man rushed towards him wielding a knife with which he inflicted terrible wounds “to my neck, to my chest, to my eye, everywhere”, excruciatingly severing the optic nerve of Rushdie’s right eye. The talk he never gave was to have been about “the importance of keeping writers safe from harm”.

Taken to hospital by emergency helicopter, Rushdie wasn’t expected to live. Thankfully, he did. Last week, the trial began of Hadi Matar for attempted murder. He pleaded not guilty. The main witness was Rushdie himself.

Matar told the New York Post that he had read two pages of Rushdie’s novel and watched him on YouTube videos. That was why, for Rushdie, the attack “wasn’t about The Satanic Verses”. Yet few of those who, over the years, have regarded The Satanic Verses as the devil’s work had read it. “I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is,” proclaimed Syed Shahabuddin, the Indian MP who in 1988 led calls for the novel to be banned. For such critics, as for Matar, The Satanic Verses is not a book to be read and analysed but one to be denounced, preferably unread, a symbol of the desecration of God’s law that had, in some people’s minds, to be avenged with brutal violence.

The power of the symbolic is not unique to the debate over The Satanic Verses, nor to Islam, but a key feature of contemporary debate. Think of the way some antiracists demand that works of art by “inappropriate” artists be destroyed or statues of unacceptable historical figures be torn down. These are means of marking social boundaries, redrawing moral lines, limiting human activity. There is no better illustration of such boundary-marking than the issue at the heart of The Satanic Verses controversy: blasphemy.

The sacred sphere, as the French sociologist Émile Durkheim observed a century ago, constitutes a social space that is set apart and protected from being defiled. Blasphemy defines that which is forbidden for fear of despoiling that space. It protects not just the dignity of the divine but the citadels of earthly power, too. As England’s lord chief justice Sir Matthew Hale observed in a blasphemy trial in 1675, to disparage Christianity would “dissolve all those obligations whereby civil societies are preserved”. To defend political authority, it was necessary to police blasphemy. Today, Christianity can no longer play its old social role. Britain is both more secular and more plural in faith and culture. It is necessary, many now argue, to protect all faiths and cultures from “scurrility, vilification, ridicule and contempt”, as Lord Scarman put it.

The blasphemy law was finally repealed in England and Wales in 2008 and Scotland in 2024 (though blasphemy remains an offence in Northern Ireland). In its stead, laws had already been enacted to criminalise hate speech and outlaw public displays that might cause “harassment, alarm or distress” to help “safeguard the internal tranquillity of the kingdom” in Scarman’s words, echoing Hale.

Earlier this month, Martin Frost publicly set fire to a Qur’an in Manchester. He was arrested and convicted of “racially or religiously aggravated intentional harassment or alarm” to Fahad Iqbal, a passerby, who told the court in a victim impact statement that he was “shocked, disgusted and offended” by what he saw. “The Qur’an is a sacred book to Muslims,” the judge told Frost, and his actions were bound “to cause extreme distress”.

Here is a form of blasphemy restriction but in secular garb, a crime of distressing an individual rather than transgressing theological norms. Frost was not the first person to face such a conviction. In 2011, Andrew Ryan, a member of the English Defence League, was imprisoned for torching a Qur’an. Nor is it just religious symbols that are protected. Emdadur Choudhury, of Muslims Against Crusades, was convicted of burning poppies on Remembrance Day and so likely to cause “harassment, harm or distress” to those who witnessed it.

Most forms of book-burning are, to my mind, senseless. Many desecrators, including Ryan and Choudhury, are bigots. Nevertheless, the destruction of objects with symbolic power has long been part of the traditions of protest and not one we should lightly discard. We should no more support secular versions of blasphemy laws than the old religious variety; not least, because many of those struggling for justice and equality – women, gay people, non-believers – are often battling against faith-based restrictions and cannot but be blasphemous.

The use of God’s law to protect profane power is a key theme of The Satanic Verses. In one scene, Salman (as Rushdie, with knowing conceit, calls the scribe who commits to paper God’s revelations that Muhammad receives from the Archangel Gabriel) begins to “notice how useful and well-timed the angel’s revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound’s views [Mahound is the name in the novel for the Prophet Muhammad] on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound”. The word of God is, for Rushdie, constructed to protect the temporal rule of the rich and powerful. That is why, he insists, it should be defied, even defiled.

“A poet’s work,” one of the characters in The Satanic Verses observes, is “to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” “And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict,” the narrator adds, “then they will nourish him.”

Thirty-four years later, it was Rushdie himself who had to endure those cuts, “watching the pool of my blood spreading outwardly from my body. That’s a lot of blood, I thought.”

He was anything but “nourished” by that river of blood. Nevertheless, Rushdie remains unbowed about the role of poets (or novelists or writers). Language, he writes, “could cut open the world and reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets, its truth… It could call bullshit, open people’s eyes, create beauty. Language was my knife.”

Would that we could all wield it so.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist

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