This chapter considers the wider implications of The Satanic Verses affair and the fatwa. It engages with Rushdie’s considerations of Islam, secularism, and the complexities of geopolitical leadership of the Muslim world. The chapter also explores the wider questions and implications of freedom of expression that have been raised in Europe especially at the time and structured Britain’s relationship with Iran between 1989 and 1998. The chapter examines Rushdie’s own responses to the fatwa, collected in the final sections in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands as well as considering responses from Muslim literary critics and writers, some of whom supported Rushdie, others who spoke out against him, to illuminate the wider public debates around freedom of expression, secularism, and faith, which have proved central to a consideration of Rushdie’s work.

Salman Rushdie’s work has exponentially engaged with questions of separatism, terror, and terrorism in an aesthetic mode that draws on certain Orientalist and neo-Orientalist tropes. Taking account of geopolitical and local contexts, this chapter focuses on how Rushdie in fiction and nonfiction has responded to separatism, terror, and terrorism at local, national, and global levels. At the core of this discussion is an analysis of Rushdie’s engagement with Kashmir, from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown and Joseph Anton. By bringing postcolonial critiques of Orientalism into conversation with recent developments in world-systems analysis, the chapter traces the ways in which Rushdie’s representation of the wider geopolitical consequences of terrorism and state-led terror helps to make sense of the war machine of empire in ways that are sometimes obfuscated by Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a secular hero of free speech.