“We had a board meeting where the members were split right down the middle,” Tony Lacey remembers. “Editorial (me and others) [were] arguing for publication; others [were] arguing very powerfully that we had too many vulnerable employees around the world—someone saying it wasn’t us that would get attacked but somebody running a Penguin office in Athens or Istanbul.

“Peter [Mayer] swayed the meeting towards publication, and we decided to do it. But that very night a small incendiary device was thrown into a London bookshop, and the following day we postponed the decision.”

Mayer insists that he and Penguin struck the right balance: they published the book, they held their ground in the face of great pressure to withdraw it, and they kept everybody safe. More than 60 people died in the controversy. None were Penguin employees.

Andrew Wylie scoffs at the idea that Penguin’s decision was an agonized response to rapidly unfolding events. “There was a concerted effort by the U.S. and U.K. publishing community to block the paperback publication,” he says firmly. “That effort was spearheaded by Peter Mayer of Penguin. . . . It was shameful, really; there was nothing admirable about it.”

Gradually, Rushdie began to appear in public: led through a back door into Waterstones Piccadilly; conveyed by motorcade to Columbia University; taken by the Royal Air Force to Washington, where he lunched in secret with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other senators at the Capitol, then surreptitiously took tea with Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham in Georgetown. But he would be a man with no fixed address for another decade—into the age of Bridget Jones and Monica Lewinsky, of Amazon and al-Qaeda.

‘When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes.” The world changes with it, and so does literature, if the book is strong enough. The Satanic Verses is a world-changing book. In 1991, Don DeLillo brought out Mao II, a novel organized around the twin towers of literature and terrorism and featuring a writer in hiding. In 1993, Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and among those implicated was a blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had denounced The Satanic Verses. Amis, McEwan, and Hitchens were turning more and more to the subjects of terror and radical fundamentalism, and after the Trade Center was destroyed, claiming nearly 3,000 lives, the writers amped up the volume. “We respect Islam—the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history,” Amis wrote, “but Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination.” McEwan focused a novel—Saturday—around a rally in London against the war in Iraq. Hitchens articulated his fervor against “Islamofascism,” eventually speaking out against all organized religion and explaining how the events of 1989—when “my friend Salman Rushdie was hit by a simultaneous death sentence and life sentence, for the crime of writing a work of fiction”—contributed to his eventual view that “religion kills.”

By then Salman Rushdie had moved to New York and taken up an emphatically public life with Padma Lakshmi, the model and actress turned gourmand. Their life became a thousand and one nights chronicled unkindly in the tabloids, whose columnists seemed to begrudge him his very existence. He had close friends in America. Wylie was in New York, Hitchens was in Washington, and in time Martin Amis would join them, settling in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Atlantic Avenue import shops, many of their signs in Arabic.

“The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one,” Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses, and he has asserted the fact of his aliveness. In the quarter-century since the fatwa, he has published a dozen books and given scores of public readings and addresses. In 2007 departing prime minister Tony Blair successfully recommended him for knighthood. He has fulfilled a lifelong dream of adapting Midnight’s Children into a feature film. And he has seen The Satanic Verses become, remarkably, just another great book on history’s shelf, regarded less as a forbidden book (talk of the fatwa has diminished with the years) than as a classic of contemporary English-language literature.

Christopher Hitchens’s very public passing from cancer in 2011 prompted Rushdie to reflect on death and his friend. “With most writers, you can see the arc of the work,” he told Hitchens’s widow, Carol Blue, “and you know where the career is going. But with Christopher it’s as if he was stopped midsentence.”

It is easy to forget, but Rushdie’s career might have ended midsentence, too.