Arise, Sir SalmanRushdie's knighthood reignites "Salmanophobia" at home and abroad.

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Eighteen years ago, Rushdie was much mocked—at a moment when he lived in danger of his life—by politicians and commentators on the right. Sure enough, in Tuesday's Daily Mail, Ruth Dudley Edwards returned to this theme by sharing her "prevailing thoughts" about Rushdie: "Self-important, pretentious, attention-seeking and ungrateful."

It would take a long essay to explain why Rushdie is so disliked by the right here, though it dates back a quarter-century to his days as self-appointed scourge of post-imperial British racism. Sutherland, his great champion, points out that The Satanic Verses was "extremely rude about England," which makes it the more striking that "he now has pledged himself in the personal service of the monarch!" (A rather literal-minded notion of what a knight is expected to do nowadays.)

The eruption of the Satanic Verses affair on St. Valentine's Day 1989 caught everyone by surprise, and indeed, as with the Danish cartoon affair, it was really factitious. It would never have happened if some zealot hadn't scoured a work of literary fiction previously unheard of in Tehran and thereby inflamed the passions of scores of millions who had not read it, and would never read it or any other novel.

Not that Rushdie was, or is, friendless. During the first drama, he was bravely defended by writers like Norman Mailer, who didn't know him, but still more by his group of friends, the most prominent literary gang in England: McEwan, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens. They have spoken out again, and, one could say, with the authority of renewed success: McEwan may shortly reach the top of the New York Times fiction best-seller list with his new novel On Chesil Beach, while Hitchens has already made it to the top of the nonfiction list with his atheistical polemic God Is Not Great. On Monday, Hitchens appeared on The Ten O'Clock News, the main BBC-TV news show, and gave a fine bulldog performance, saying that it was no business of these remote peoples to say who should be honored by the sovereign.

How much good this support will do Rushdie is another matter, and some of his defenders seem to have their own political agendas. Back in 1989, the xenophobic right that turned on Rushdie was personified by Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher's chief lieutenants, who called Rushdie "an outstanding villain" and a man whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality. Now he betrays even his own sneers at the British establishment."

But now there is a new group of ardent Anglo-neoconservative supporters of the American alliance, the Iraq war, and the crusade against "Islamofascism" who have rallied to Rushdie's cause. One of them is Daniel Finkelstein, comment editor and columnist at the Times, who is running a campaign to "Support Sir Salman." The decision to honor him was "bold and correct," says Finkelstein's manifesto: Apart from "the merit of his literary work, the author is a symbol of free speech."

That's what McEwan says as well, with his "firm message to the book-burners and their appeasers." Whether Rushdie really wants to be enlisted as a foot soldier—no, a knight is a member of the equestrian order—in this renewed clash of civilizations is another matter.

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