Tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini's issuing his fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's death. The burning of The Satanic Verses on Britain's streets was a defining moment. The novel's alleged slur on the Prophet Muhammad politicised many Muslims, pushing them in a more radical, confrontational direction. Some see the Rushdie controversy as the first step on the road to the 7/7 terrorist attacks.
But good came from that 20-year-old furore. It was the catalyst for a furious and fast-paced debate about what it means to be British. While other European countries have only just started to grapple with the growing immigrant communities, the Rushdie affair helped to compress change and the evolution of national identity into a few years. One day we will look back and admit that we are better for it.
In the 1960, 70s and 80s the first generation of black and Asian immigrants tried to fit in by playing down their cultural differences with each other and the British mainstream. By and large, immigrant communities kept away from politics - and when they did enter the political arena, Asians and West Indians were united in wholly secular movements such as Rock Against Racism.
But as immigrant numbers grew in the 1980s, “black unity” started to splinter into smaller identities, divided by religion or country of origin. Sikhs - who fought to be exempt from the crash-helmet laws because of their turbans - were the first to become politicised. In 1984, when the Indian Government attacked the Golden Temple, India's holiest Sikh shrine, a much more forceful Sikh identity started to take shape. Hindus also started to assume a more religious identity as revivalist movements grew in India.
British Muslims went farther down the segregationist road. Frustrated by the unwillingness of politicians and the media to share their anger at Rushdie, many started mobilising. The Muslim Parliament was set up in 1992 because some British Muslims felt they needed parallel institutions to champion their causes. It discouraged Muslims from voting, let alone entering mainstream politics, seeking to create a “non-territorial Islamic state” in Britain.
The realisation that such confrontational political Islam would not work in Britain cleared the way for the rise of “community leaders”. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), modelled on the Jewish Board of Deputies, was founded in 1997. It pushed the view that British Muslims had to get involved in national politics if they wanted to fight for their interests.
Although this approach suited the Government's quasi-colonial, multicultural approach to ethnic minorities and was helpful after 9/11 and the riots in Oldham and Burnley in 2001, it unravelled after 7/7. It had become clear that throwing money at these groups was neither building social cohesion nor dampening down extremism.
When Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, seemed to dismiss “multiculturalism”, he opened the floodgates to an angry debate on whether Britain was being split apart by focusing too heavily on promoting cultural diversity. But that debate began with the Satanic Verses controversy; at heart it was about the search for cultural identity - can you be both Muslim and British?
The collapse of the old identity politics is to be welcomed because it indicates progress to a stage where we are all happy with multiple identities - geographical, cultural, national, racial and more. The earlier associations of British identity, first with race and whiteness, then with a particular culture or way of life, cannot survive in this globalised era. So we are all, regardless of colour, searching for a new language to describe ourselves. British? English? Scottish Muslim? Black British?
Why should I be seen merely as an Asian? I am equally importantly a Briton, a vegetarian, a Londoner, of Sikh origin and much more.
It is important to remember two things. First, to take an American analogy, Britain had to go through the Malcolm X and Jesse Jackson phase - the confrontational “black power” approach - to reach the more conciliatory Obama generation. But whereas the US went through this over several decades, we have zoomed past it much quicker. Without these controversies progress would have been much slower.
Second, a clash of ideas is necessary for progression, however repetitive it might become. Two years ago Inayat Bunglawala, the assistant general secretary of the MCB, admitted in an article entitled “I used to be a book burner” that he had been wrong to call for The Satanic Verses to be banned: “I believe the freedom to offend is a necessary freedom,” he added, completing a spectacular U-turn.
Successive controversies have generated much less anger and revealed, despite a noisy fringe of extremists, an increasing political maturity among British Muslims. The row over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet led to a few protests in Britain, but the general reaction was more subdued than the past.
Muslim groups now regularly state that British Muslims have more religious freedom than in almost any other country. In the past they would never have admitted such a thing. The climate has changed.
Today, there is open willingness within ethnic minorities to highlight religious extremism or forced marriage. A growing number of young people from ethnic minorities are reaching the top ranks of politics and the media. The BNP has become wary of admitting its own racism and even the most virulent right-wing tabloids accept that modern Britain is a multiracial society where people have hyphenated identities.
Despite the rows and arguments, the British experience has been much better than that in Europe. France sticks to its official colour-blind approach but it has failed to make minorities feel that they have a stake in mainstream society. Germany has yet to shake off its history of associating nationality with bloodline and makes it difficult for even third or fourth-generation Turks to be full citizens. The Netherlands has careered from extremely liberal attitudes to much more xenophobic ones. Britain, in marked contrast, has conducted itself in remarkable civility.
What started with the furore around The Satanic Verses has not yet finished and probably never will - as the world evolves, the way we think about ourselves will mutate too. But thanks to Salman Rushdie and the book-burners, we are at least being spared the long, drawn-out convulsions of change.
Sunny Hundal