God is described in the book as "The Destroyer of Man". Our opponents could in the end only allege six blasphemies in the book, and each one was based either on a misreading or on theological error:
The plot, in short, is not an advertisement for apostasy. The other, Gibreel, poleaxed by his spiritual need to believe in God and his intellectual inability to return to the faith, finally kills himself. The first survives by returning to his roots. The book is the fictional story of two men, infused with Islam but confused by the temptations of the west. Their efforts convinced me that The Satanic Verses is not blasphemous. The magistrate refused, so the prosecutor appealed to the High Court, where 13 Muslim barristers attempted to get the book banned, but their action forced them to draft an indictment against Rushdie and his publishers specifying with legal precision the way in which the novel had blasphemed.
It was not long before a private prosecutor tried to issue a summons against the author of The Satanic Versesto attend, at the Old Bailey, his trial for blasphemous libel. Rushdie's difficulties brought many of his north London friends into a closer and warmer contact with officers of the Special Branch than they might ever have thought likely.
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