The committee that recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood did not discuss any possible political ramifications and never imagined that the award would provoke the furious response that it has done in parts of the Muslim world, the Guardian has learnt.

It also emerged yesterday that the writers' organisation that led the lobbying for the author of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses to be knighted had originally hoped that the honour would lead to better relations between Britain and Asia.

The news came as the row spread around the world and the British high commissioner in Islamabad made representations to the Pakistani government over remarks supposedly made by the minister for religious affairs, Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq, in which he appeared to justify suicide bombings as a response to the award.

Rushdie was celebrating his 60th birthday in London yesterday and is not commenting on the latest threats to his life. It is understood he is anxious not to inflame the situation. Scotland Yard declined to comment as a matter of policy on whether the writer has been given police protection.

The arts and media committee that proposed him for a knighthood is one of eight similar committees that make recommendations to the main committee, which then forwards the final names to the prime minister.

It was chaired by Lord Rothschild, the investment banker and former chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery. The other committee members are Jenny Abramsky, the BBC's director of radio and music; novelist and poet Ben Okri, who is vice-president of the English chapter of PEN International, which campaigns on behalf of writers who face persecution; Andreas Whittam Smith, former editor of the Independent; John Gross, the author and former theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph; and two permanent secretaries, one from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and one from the Scottish executive.

"Very properly, we were concerned only with merit in relation to the level of the award," Mr Whittam Smith said yesterday.

He added that it would be for the main committee to assess any other aspects of the honour. The Foreign Office is represented on the main committee by the permanent secretary, whose job it would be to raise any potential international ramifications. A Foreign Office spokesman said he was not aware of any request by the honours committee to gauge likely Muslim reaction to the knighthood before the decision was taken.

PEN International, which campaigned on behalf of Rushdie when he was in hiding during the fatwa years, has lobbied consistently for him to be honoured. Yesterday the director of its London chapter, Jonathan Heawood, said that he was taken aback by the scale of the reaction.

Mr Heawood said it had been felt that an honour for the writer, who was born in Bombay (now Mumbai), would be seen as a positive step in British-Asian relations.

"The honour is for services to literature and a very belated recognition that he is a world writer, who was in the vanguard of a writing tradition that exploded in the 80s in south Asia," said Mr Heawood.

"It seems a shame that a few lines in his fourth novel should have turned him into this hate figure. He has become a Guy Fawkes figure to be thrown on a bonfire whenever it suits a government to divert attention from what is happening in their own countries."

The Pakistani foreign ministry summoned the British high commissioner yesterday to complain about the knighthood, but British officials said they used the occasion to protest about the remarks by Mr Ejaz ul-Haq, who has since said that his comments were a statement of fact and not intended to incite violence.

"The high commissioner, Robert Brinkley, made clear to the Pakistan ministry of foreign affairs the British government's deep concern about what the minister of religious affairs is reported to have said," a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. "We made very clear that nothing can justify suicide bomb attacks."

However, Pakistan's foreign minister, Kurshid Kasuri, said on a visit to Washington that Britain could not have been surprised by the outrage.

The chairman of the all-party group on Pakistan, the Conservative MP Stewart Jackson, also attacked the decision to knight Rushdie. "We do not need a situation where we are gratuitously offending our allies in the fight against terror," he told the ePolitix website. "I think the prime minister's office should think very carefully about that decision."

No date has been set for the investiture. Two ceremonies are due to take place next month but they are likely to be for those who were named in the New Year's honours list. Rushdie could become Sir Salman in the next batch of investitures between October and December or early next year.

'To say it is an insult is absurd'

Hari Kunzru

"The idea that it is some kind of calculated insult is an absurdity. The real insult - to the intelligence and decency of 'the world's 1.5 billion Muslims', for whom people such as Mohammed Ejaz ul-Haq presume to speak - comes from the ignorance and paranoia of leaders who feel so threatened by a novelist that they'll call for him to be killed."

Kathy Lette

"Being Australian, of course, I'm slightly allergic to royal anointing of any kind ... but I am definitely in favour of celebrating the achievements of writers. Salman deserves to win every accolade imaginable for his creative gifts, but also for his immense bravery."

Lisa Appignanesi

"For Iran's foreign ministry to wade into our honours system and portray the decision to honour Rushdie as 'an orchestrated act of aggression directed against Islamic societies' is to repeat the mistake which began with Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa."

Will Self

"Given the furore that The Satanic Verses occasioned, it does strike me that any responsible writer might ask himself whether the fallout from accepting such an honour was really worth the bauble ... it is surely better that writers decline any form of honour."

Ruth Dudley Edwards

"There is only one explanation why Rushdie has been singled out. It is that Tony Blair ... wants to put two fingers up to Iran as well as to extremist Islam everywhere."