It was the early months of 1989, and they were becoming strange days indeed. It’s not often you see two policemen on their knees looking under your bed, glancing into your wardrobe and dragging aside your shower curtain to make sure there’s no terrorist waiting to spring out and strangle a novelist who’s popped round for a drink. But in the North of England bearded Pakistanis were buying books in their local Waterstone’s before setting fire to them; and a foreign government had just pronounced a “fatwa” – whatever that was – on a writer for a wild piece of postmodern prose concerning migration, the breakdown of belief, multiple subjectivities and the chaos and derangement of capitalistic acceleration.

As if that wasn’t enough: with the cops sniffing around, you couldn’t even smoke a joint in your own living room. Luckily, Salman assured me, the policeman wouldn’t leap up and handcuff me since he really had no sense of smell.

Then, one morning, the Labour MP for Leicester East, Keith Vaz, whom I knew a little – a polite man, he’d introduced me to his mother in the House of Commons – called to say we could rely on his support for Rushdie until the end. That night I glimpsed him on television leading a march in his constituency against the novel. You’d have to say that realism was getting very magical in a black sort of way; and one of the problems with reality, as The Satanic Verses points out, is that it is always being invaded by unreality. That which we believe is solid can melt in a moment. And the novel of all things – probably the form which most lends itself to the exploration of human complexity – had become the site of a world-wide controversy.

A few days later I was sitting with Harold Pinter in a pub near Downing Street and we were trying to work out what to say to Margaret Thatcher if she happened to be in when we passed by with our statement about protecting novelists from intimidation by foreign governments. To our relief, Thatcher wouldn’t meet us, but creditably she did say, “There are no grounds on which the government would consider banning the book”.

Unfortunately my father saw me on television wandering around outside Downing Street and nearly had another heart attack. He had worked in the Pakistan High Commission for most of his life and had warned me that Muslims could become more than agitated if provoked about the Prophet. During Ramadan he had to eat his sandwiches behind a tree in Hyde Park for fear a colleague would spot him breaking the fast. Now he rang me up yelling that I should keep out of “the fatwa business”.

Dad had admired the way Jewish writers and artists had flourished in the West. Philip Roth had run into some community trouble with his great Portnoy, but once he became admired and famous everyone shut up and claimed him as a literary hero and truth-teller. Dad said Jewish children were part of Britain: they were westernized without forgetting their heritage. Why couldn’t we as a migrant community do that? Why were we going the other way?

What, I wondered, was the “other way” my father referred to? What exactly was going on? What was this “return” and where had this new political and moral fervour come from?

If my friends and I as a generation were surprised and even amused by the fatwa and the level of fury The Satanic Verses was provoking, perhaps we boomers had become inured to outrage, insult and provocation. A turd in a tin, a pile of bricks, copulation in an art gallery, dirty nappies, menstrual pads: not a flicker did they raise among the sophisticated. Outrage was style: it was what we expected before we went out to supper. Soaked in drugs and exhausted by years of random copulation, maybe nothing much registered with us now and we were jaded after decades of hectic nihilistic rock and roll and consumerism. The Berlin Wall had fallen; Soviet Marxism was over. Perhaps it was true, as some intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama suggested, it had been the end times, and we’d really been living in the best of all political worlds.

Not only that, hadn’t novels and their authors been pointlessly condemned before? D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others, had been pursued and prosecuted. And seriously, had anyone become morally worse after reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Tropic of Cancer? There was nothing about banning and prohibition to suggest that it wasn’t a waste of time and money. As the years passed, attempts at censorship looked even worse: the Sex Pistols, for instance – on the yellow press’s front pages for weeks – had been more pantomime and PR than subversion.

Despite this, at the time of the fatwa a lot of the media noise concerned Western liberals, intellectuals and even novelists calling for the book to be withdrawn or not published in paperback to protect the feelings of “insulted” Muslims, though it was doubtful that these people had ever met a Muslim, let alone one who was insulted. Richard Webster, for instance, in A Brief History of Blasphemy (1990) writes about The Satanic Verses, saying, “its reception and defence by liberal intellectuals had seemed to give a kind of moral licence to racism which had always been latent”. John le Carré said, “My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity”. Roald Dahl wrote to The Times: “In a civilized world we all have a moral obligation to apply a modicum of censorship to our own work in order to reinforce this principle of free speech”.

If they wanted to give way on Rushdie, what other censorships would they end up favouring? This group were not unlike Soviet fellow-travellers – useful idiots – with little idea that their naivety and wish to side with the underdog was protecting a murderous and authoritarian ideology they wouldn’t want to live under for a moment. According to this elite form of colonial patronizing, free speech was only for the select few; the poor and benighted – as they were seen – couldn’t deal with, or ever require, satire, criticism or scabrous story-telling. The book burners and censor-mongers weren’t adult enough to think about simple but essential questions: why should we do what God says? And, when is obedience a good idea, and when is it not?

More importantly, it didn’t occur to these so-called liberals that the insulted book burners and putative writer-killers whose feelings they were keen to protect might turn out to inflict immeasurable harm on their own communities, eventually promoting a Salafi version of Islam which was not only a betrayal of religion, but of women, minorities and most Muslims who had come to the West to make a better future for their children. If my father had been surprised by how English, as he put it, we, his children had become, that was the price he knew he had to pay for the opportunities he’d got on the boat for.

If these weak and guilty liberals didn’t like the idea of people being insulted – though one always chooses to be insulted – it might have been advisable for them to fight the ubiquitous racism their society generated rather than shutting down a fellow artist who was asking important questions about migration, identity and the sort of world being created by the market economy. Rushdie had touched on the untouchable, and was saying the unsayable. That, after all, was the point of serious writing, though not the sort of writing his literary detractors – thriller writers and children’s entertainers, mostly – were capable of.

One thing more: what exactly had Rushdie touched on with his critique of Islam? What was the unsayable? The fury he had aroused guaranteed, it occurred to me, that he had spoken aloud the deeply forbidden thing: the doubts of many believers. Surely the people who most infuriate us, the ones we most hate, are those who create the most conflict in us? Doubt, disbelief and transformation were intolerable to those who’d moved to a new land. Doubt could bring with it a total loss of one’s bearings. And those who intimated this wanted to kill the messenger.

The time of the fatwa certainly politicized me; many of us from Muslim, immigrant backgrounds had to rethink our identity and politics. Who exactly were we in the new country and what did we want to be? Why was it so difficult for us to get on? And, importantly, what were we even called?

For most of my life immigrants and their children were known as Asian, a term vague and inaccurate enough not to be as offensive as some of the other words used for us. Now, organized around the fatwa, the religious designation, Muslim, began to emerge. It had barely been used in the West before; now it became common. Looking back, I can see that this was a fatal identification and mis-step, giving rise to the false idea that we were a unified religious community who all believed the same thing; and not only that, were separate from other minority groups who were in a similar position in Britain. Even in Pakistan recently a gay friend said to me, “They call us Muslims and we’re not even religious! They think we all believe the same thing! We’ve been boxed in”.

After the fatwa, in the early 1990s, when I began to research the novel which became The Black Album, I noticed that the young Muslims I met were not interested in Rushdie or literature at all; and we barely discussed free speech. Even worse, I realized, no one had thought to interest them in Britain, and certainly not in the Britain I’d loved, of the 1960s and 70s, of fashion, theatre and dance, of drugs, dissent and the fascinating counter-cultural churn of ideas: feminism, patriarchy, sexuality, class.

Those whom we once called “fundamentalists” had become Islamists, and they didn’t require tools to think with because they knew already what they wanted. They weren’t superstitious, benighted former villagers, but scientists, professors and star, grade-A students. And what they were involved in seemed more like a cult than a religion. They had submitted to God, so they said, and were keen to have others submit to them. They’d moved beyond the usual rules of sociability, and weren’t people you could debate or engage with. They would sneer, harangue and intimidate. It wouldn’t be difficult for them to colonize and impose their ideas on a heterogeneous and vulnerable community. Where, I wondered, were the more balanced, older people in the mosques?

Ultimately this group wanted to recruit believers to help them make a political return to the centuries after the Prophet had died. They even promised, as a vanguard, to create a state based on the strict, macho-fascist Salafi principles that ISIS would later adopt. (I call it fascism because fascism always uses ideas of purity, sacrifice and return, alongside the promised elimination of a particular group, as fundamentals.) This notion was a perfect compromise for this relatively small group of paranoiac men bursting with revolutionary fervour. They would, as young people have to, betray their parents, but only in this particular way: by being morally more severe. It was a return, but it was a new form of political religion.

I remember thinking of them on the day of the London 7/7 bombings, in 2005, when fifty-two people were killed. Three out of four of the terrorists were under the age of twenty-two, and three of them were the sons of Pakistani immigrants. They had, apparently, been inspired by the lectures of the imam Anwar al-Awlaki.

We know now that the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine was right: that those who begin by burning books end by burning people. Salman Rushdie wrote a good book and couldn’t have predicted the furious outcome. But we know that what the Bradford book-burners and Islamists should have seen was that Islamism was never going to be a theology of liberation. Their actions have been a disaster, contributing to the rise of an active, virulent fascistic Right in Europe, one that condemns minorities and wants to reaffirm a Judaeo-Christian future. The creation of the phantasmic figure of the Muslim – to which religious fanatics have stupidly added much colour – is used to justify an increase in prejudice, racism and hate unlike anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

Now the community has to fight on several fronts: to detoxify itself, get up off its knees and open itself to better ideas from a range of voices, particularly women and the young. It has to join with other groups to fight against racism. None of this is impossible. Fascism doesn’t evolve, it’s always the same, but immigrant communities and their children change every day. They should be horrified by the image of themselves that has been created. The part of multiculturalism which is essentialist – limiting groups to a parade of “authentic” dances, exotic clothes and practices – has also to be fought. The message of the Enlightenment is that we have some choice over who we want to be, making our own destiny as individuals, without submitting to gods, revelation or ancestors. The basis of this is a liberal education and a democracy of ideas. These are not British values – over which Europeans have no monopoly – but universal ones.

There’s no doubt that the fatwa was one of the strangest and most significant events in literary history. But what should it continue to remind us of? I can recall, at the end of the 1990s, seeing Rushdie being interviewed on television, where he said something like, “Fundamentalists lack a sense of humour”. This remark struck me as important, encouraging us to notice that the greatest works of literature are often comedies, and that comedy is a vital value, particularly when it comes to mocking privilege, power and dogma. The fundamentalists of the time, and the Islamists who followed them – whether part of al-Qaeda, ISIS or one of the other many groups – have intimidation, humiliation and the desire to shut people up in common. We should not fail to notice that many of the Islamists’ attacks – on Rushdie himself, Theo van Gogh, Charlie Hebdo, and music venues and clubs – are attacks on cultural pleasure, playfulness and sexual freedom.

Novels and other forms of storytelling might present, analyse and satirize tyrants, but they don’t themselves tyrannize over us. Novels, if they’re doing it right, show us people as they are in their complexity, not as they should be. They can create disorder, using language to free us from the bondage of a particular way of seeing, increasing our autonomy. Disobedience, as every child knows, is a form of freedom, and absolute certainty is a form of madness. Mockery is authority’s nightmare, and the return of religion, of the tyrant and strong man, should inspire us to better doubts and more questions, naivety and enquiry. Tyrants seek to heal conflicts by pretending that everything is already decided. They need to be reminded that questions about power, gender, class, sexuality can never be defined once and for all, but are conditional and must be open to experimentation. This is radicalism, which bears no resemblance to the phoney conservative “radicalism” we’ve been subject to.

Notions of criticism, free-ranging thought, and questioning are universal values which benefit the relatively powerless in particular. If we gave way on any of these, even for a moment, we’d leave ourselves without a culture, and with no hope.