“To understand how we got here, you have to cast your mind back long before July 7, 2005, or even September 11, 2001, to February 14, 1989,” says British writer Matthew d’Ancona. “That was the day that Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa on Salman Rushdie over his novel, The Satanic Verses.” In a commentary for The Sunday Telegraph, d’Ancona argues that Britain did not take in the full import of the fundamentalism behind the fatwa, and he worries that it is not taking it in now. “In The Satanic Verses, the angelic Gibreel is affronted by the “moral fuzziness” of the English, and tries to bring about a fundamentalist revolution — ‘religious fervour, political ferment’ — by making the weather as ferociously hot in London as it is in the subcontinent,” observes d’Ancon. “Of course, Gibreel fails. The heat wave passes. The English recoil from fundamentalism, as ever, back to their treasured belief in doubt, reason and compromise. What a powerful parable for our times, from a book that marked the beginning of it all.”