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“I’m interested in what The Satanic Verses meant at the moment of its publication in 1989/90: with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the extinction of socialism as a project of human liberation, and, coincident with that, the emergence of Islam or Islamism as both a threat and a promise – and how a novel manages to be the axis on which these huge global events turn…The Satanic Verses represents a moment of liberation – the end of the Cold War – but also the inauguration of a different kind of struggle. Is it correctly conceived as a war of civilisations? Probably not. Is it correctly conceived as a war on terror? Definitely not. But there is no doubt that there is a new agon, a new principle of division and conflict in all its complexity, and The Satanic Verses prefigures it as well as contributing to it.” Read more...
Anthony Julius, Lawyer
