Not long after it appeared in 1988, The Satanic Verses (SV) inspired a number of authors to refute it in Persian. These writers treat Rushdie's novel as a work of theology and philosophy, and, in the long tradition of raddiyeh-nevisi or “refutation-writing,” present a variety of arguments based on Islamic sources to expose its falsehoods and slanders. This article examines the conventions of Rushdie refutation in Persian. It shows how refuters have taken advantage of the license afforded by polemical works to circumvent the absolute suppression of SV in Iran to translate certain parts of the banned work into Persian. One of the customary ways around the prohibition against publishing the unprintable is to invoke the saying naql-e kofr kofr nabāshad or “transmission of blasphemy is not considered blasphemous” (Dehkhodā 4:1825). This is explicit in the introduction of one of the most traditional refutations (Hādi Modarresi, 9).

Refutations of SV are important in general, because, as is often the case in raddiyeh literature in Arabic and Persian, they are the only permissible fora for public discourse of the text. At times, the refutation provides the sole evidence that the refuted text existed.

One of the first Persian attacks on SV is Ḥeqārat-e Salmān Roshdi (“The Inferiority of Salman Rushdie”) by Moṣṭafā Ḥoseyni Ṭabāṭabā’i, a thirty-eight-page pamphlet that appeared about a year after Rushdie's novel. The author argues that the Indian-born, but Anglophilic author's nearly congenital inferiority made him the ideal tool for plots designed to undermine Islam and the Islamic Republic of Iran. In his work, Ḥoseyni Ṭabāṭabā’i develops a theory repeated often in Rushdie refutation: that the author of SV is a self-hating Muslim, fatally wounded by a West that has used him to undermine Islam.

Ḥeqārat-e Salmān Roshdi is not Ḥoseyni Ṭabāṭāb’i's first refutation of secular works about the Prophet Mohammad. He is also responsible for a three-volume response to ’Ali Dashti's Bist-o seh sāl (“Twenty-three Years”- an examination of the Prophet's political career by a cleric who left the fold) that reproduces almost all of the banned work to refute it. To contextualize Rushdie's inferiority in the history, Ḥoseyni Ṭabāṭabā’i briefly summarizes anti-Islamic polemics, beginning with literature that emerged after Christian defeats in the Crusades.