Twenty years ago the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the death of the British author Salman Rushdie for his book, The Satanic Verses. It prompted a passionate debate across the world about freedom of speech and whether it should be curtailed to prevent offence to deeply-held religious belief.
This was the first time that cultural conflict between Muslims and western liberal democratic values had erupted: it has subsequently emerged as one of the dominant issues of our age.
We bring two of the original protagonists of those debates in 1989, Sir Iqbal Sacranie and Lisa Appignanesi back together again to reflect on what happened and whether the intervening years have changed their minds at all.
Sacranie became a leading figure of the protest movement in the British Muslim community, and famously declared that "death would be too easy" for Rushdie. Back in the studio 20 years later, he insists that this quote which has dogged him ever since was a misrepresentation of how he was trying to channel the intense anger in the Muslim community in a bid to avert violence.
But Appignanesi, who was prominent in her defence of Rushdie, says that the imagination must not be restricted for fear of offence. She worries that Rushdie's years under special protection, the violence inflicted on translators of his work across the globe has had a chill factor, leaving many forms of artistic expression inhibited.
And to bring the debate to the current day, Zarah Hussain, describes as a child how she listened to her parents discussing the tumultuous events when for the first time British Muslims took to the streets in protest. She recognises how this incident was pivotal to the development of a British Muslim identity.
