From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy

Kenan Malik's From Fatwa to Jihad, published by Atlantic Books in 2009, is a scholarly study of the 1989 Rushdie affair and its lasting effects on debates over free expression, multiculturalism and religion in Britain. Its strength is that Malik combines direct reporting on the affair's aftermath with sustained historical and political analysis across the book's 266 pages, and it was longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Books in 2010, a mark of its standing among contemporaries writing on the same subject. Its limit is that it is one author's argued interpretation of a still-contested episode, so a claim resting on a disputed point of the affair's causes or consequences should be checked against other accounts of the same events as well.