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.

It is difficult, at this distance in time, to recall quite how shocking these developments were. We are nowadays habituated to sickening levels of religious violence carried out in the name of injured feelings. We’ve lived through 9/11, the London Tube bombings, the Danish cartoons row, the Charlie Hebdo murders, the weaponization of vehicles.

But, back in 1988, that Kulturkampf lay in the future. No one had heard of identity politics. The idea that there could be an incompatibility between being a devout Muslim and being the loyal citizen of a liberal democracy seemed bizarre. Terrorism was still largely associated with radical leftist groups like the Red Brigades, the IRA, the PLO, and ETA.

A lot of commentators slotted the Rushdie affair into their existing narratives of grievance and exploitation. Several Labor MPs saw the issue as being primarily about anti-colonialism and minority rights rather than secularism or free speech.

Having elevated anti-racism as their supreme value, they struggled to see past the fact that the people doing the protesting were mainly brown-skinned, And so they took up a position which, in any other context, they would have regarded as obscurantist.

Something similar happened among more than a few secularist Western Muslims. As the British writer Kenan Malik recalls, “Many anti-Rushdie campaigners were not religious, let alone ‘fundamentalist’, but young, left-wing activists. Some had been my friends.”

It was an early taste of the bizarre mésalliance between religious extremism and revolutionary socialism has lasted to this day.

Or perhaps it’s not so bizarre. When we think of Iran’s “Islamic Revolution”, we tend to focus on the first word rather than the second. In fact, other than in their religious fervor — which was itself radical and millenarian — the mullahs were very like any other revolutionaries. They abolished the monarchy, expropriated the rich, drove much of the middle class into exile, nationalized industry and established an authoritarian state. Like other radical regimes before them — France’s Jacobins, Russia’s Bolshevists — they refused to recognize territorial jurisdiction, seeking to export their revolution.

People who saw the world through the prism of anti-Americanism often gave the Ayatollahs a pass, even as they eroded civil rights and persecuted minorities at home. One such voice, funnily enough, had been Rushdie himself, who had backed the mullahs against the Shah.

Perhaps the finest irony of the whole wretched business was that, threatened by his erstwhile allies, Rushdie now had to turn for protection to what he had previously scorned as the authoritarian police state led by “Madame Torture” (Margaret Thatcher).

British coppers did their job with their usual professionalism, of course, placing themselves between the man who had denounced them and the fanatics seeking to silence him. Madame Torture held firm in defense of the freedom and safety of all her citizens, including the one who had made his living by sneering at Britain as snobbish and racist. The publisher did not withdraw the text — an attitude that was in those days unremarkable, but would today be considered recklessly brave.

On one level, the extremists lost. Rushdie is still alive and still writing. The fatwah has been denounced by numerous Muslim groups as both lacking in proper religious authority and incompatible with fundamental values. Iran’s ayatollahs face sanctions abroad and opposition at home. At the same time, though, the intellectual climate in the West has shifted palpably.

It is now almost a commonplace that Western Muslims should not be treated as ordinary citizens. Rather, they are expected to have extra-territorial loyalties as well as unique sensitivities. In the aftermath of the Rushdie affair, bookshops were bombed and translators received death-threats, yet Penguin carried on printing the book. Nowadays, the slightest suggestion that an approved victim group might kick up a fuss is enough to send publishers diving for cover.

Plenty of British Muslims hate this development. They want to be citizens like everyone else. They resent the stealthy convergence of the far-Right and the jihadi extremists, both of whom claim that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible.

That idea, which seemed so outlandish 30 years ago, is now dangerously close to becoming mainstream — which is surely the saddest legacy of all.