The ripples spreading out from London after Salman Rushdie’s inclusion on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List have reached Waziristan – or wherever Osama bin Laden now resides. He has been awarded the “Saifullah”, or sword of Allah, by Pakistani clerics who assert that Sir Salman’s honour was a deliberate effort by the West to insult Islam. The real reason for his knighthood is more simple: it is for services to literature. As to why was it awarded now, the answer is that to have delayed any longer would have been to surrender to the obscurantism that threatens the author’s life, the good name of Islam and innocent civilians everywhere.

Sir Salman’s contribution to contemporary letters is often and inevitably overlooked in favour of his unsought role at the centre of the storm unleashed by Ayatollah Khomeini’s proclamation of a fatwa in his name in 1989. His second novel, Midnight’s Children, not only won the Booker Prize in 1981 but also was later named the best novel in English in 25 years. Its kaleidoscopic evocation of the India Rushdie knew was widely acknowledged as a milestone in postcolonial writing. The Satanic Verses was variously loved and loathed by critics, but few of them questioned its scope or originality. The fatwa issued the year after publication condemned the author to a nomadic life in the company of security guards quite rightly paid for by the taxpayer – but seldom in the company of political figures, who, with few exceptions, were too wary of inflaming radical Muslim opinion to be seen with him.

It is often said in Sir Salman’s support that few of his Islamist critics ever read his supposedly offensive book. This is true, and it reflects a dangerous human capacity to conjure indignation from thin air. It is also true that those who have read it find much mockery, especially of Britain and Britishness, but little basis for the claim of gratuitous blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad. Yet even this is ultimately beside the point. Sir Salman would have merited protection at public expense, if not much public sympathy, even if the claim of blasphemy had been true.

The right to freedom of expression is as simple and absolute as any in a pluralist society. Some of the obligations it confers on Government are straightforward, such as its duty to protect Sir Salman, to defend his knighthood and to allow the release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979 despite the offence it caused many Christians. Sometimes these obligations are complex, as when officials must judge when proselytising becomes incitement to violence. And sometimes they are as odious as their beneficiaries, the “historian” (and Holocaust denier) David Irving among them. He, too, has the right to publish.

Muslim world inflamed by knighthood

A Pakistani minister said that Salman Rushdie's knighthood justified suicide bombings

• British minister: 'We stand by Rushdie knighthood'

BACKGROUND

• Honour Bound

• Suicide bomb threat over Rushdie knighthood

• Britain responds in Rushdie row

• Rushdie knighthood reignites the debate

• Troubled honour

Related Internet Links

• A symbol of free speech. Sign our petition in support of Sir Salman Rushdie

The Muslim Council of Britain has commendably urged restraint on those it represents, but condemned Sir Salman’s knighthood as “yet another example of insensitivity to Muslim opinion”. In doing so it has wasted an opportunity to show its understanding of one of this country’s defining freedoms. Lord Ahmed, Britain’s first Muslim peer, has accused Sir Salman of having “blood on his hands”. Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP, has lamented the knighthood on the ground that it has offended Britain’s allies in the struggle against terrorism. That may be so, but when a British novelist can no longer accept an honour for fear of offence in Islamabad, that war is lost.