In the Shadow of the Sword (book) tale by the ears, conjuring the half-vanished past with such gusto that characters and places fairly bound from the page." Jones goes on to finish his review by asking, "Is this Satanic Verses territory?" Holland quotes Salman Rushdie at the very beginning of the book, acknowledging, wryly, another British author who ventured onto the sticky wicket of Islam’s origin myths." Ziauddin Sardar, writing for the "New Statesman", was highly critical of the book. He says "the real aim of the book is to examine the validity of 'Muslim sources' and to assess the extent of Muslim scholarship down the centuries.
The Satanic Verses controversy moved away from a crime against God and toward something more temporal. Today we are concerned for our pain and sometimes, for other people's. Blasphemy has become an offence against the faithful – in much the same way as pornography is an offence against the innocent and the virtuous. Given this meaning, blasphemy is an ecumenical crime and so it is not surprising ... that Christians and Jews should join Muslims in calling Salman Rushdie's [book] a blasphemous book. Some rabbis, such as Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, opposed the book's publication. The