Exactly 30 years ago, India became the first country to ban The Satanic Verses, a novel by the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, which many Muslims found blasphemous.

Protests followed across the Islamic world. The book was burned in some of England’s northern cities. There were riots in Pakistan. Then in February 1989 came a world-changing event: Iran’s religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed a fatwah against the author, sentencing him to death — a sentence backed by a bounty of a million dollars put up by an Iranian religious foundation.