Abstract
A huge volume of literature has been written about Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa issued in response to it by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Whilst much literary criticism has recommended that we should avoid reading the text and the furore of “the Rushdie affair” along the harmful binary lines of Eastern tyranny and Western freedom, this article addresses this rhetoric of cultural difference directly. Arguing that an unhistorical idea of the Enlightenment is becoming increasingly central to the way that Rushdie and others explain what they perceive as the gulf between “Islam” and “the West”, and analysing Rushdie’s recent tendency to construct himself as “the new Voltaire”, this study crosses centuries and disciplines to shed new light on the ways in which the discursive figure of the Islamic despot is central to the cultural critiques of both authors.
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