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Was Salman Rushdie right to have written The Satanic Verses ? Were the protestors right to have done so? What about the Danish cartoons? This book examines the moral questions raised by cultural controversies, and how intercultural dialogue might be generated within multicultural societies.

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Acknowledgements Introduction PART I 1. From Blasphemy to Offensiveness: The Politics of Controversy 2. What is Freedom of Speech For? 3. A Difficult Freedom: Towards Mutual Understanding and the Ethics of Propriety PART II 4. The Self-Transgressions of Salman Rushdie: Re-Reading The Satanic Verses 5. Visualism and Violence: On the Art and Ethics of Provocation in the Jyllands-Posten Cartoons and Theo Van Gogh´s Submission 6. Romancing the Other: The Jewel of the Medina and the Ethics of Genre PART III 7. Satire, Incitement and Self-Restraint: Reflections on Freedom of Expression and Aesthetic Responsibility in Contemporary Britain Notes Index

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Anshuman A. Mondal is Reader in English at Brunel University, UK. He is Chair of the Postcolonial Studies Association and member of the Multicultural Textualities collective. The author of Nationalism and Post-Colonial Identity, Amitav Ghosh, and Young British Muslim Voices, he has published widely on contemporary Muslim identities and cultures, nationalism, and multiculturalism.

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