Iran has strongly criticised Britain for honouring controversial author Salman Rushdie with a knighthood, official IRNA news agency reported. The Islamic republic considers Britian's act (of awarding Rushdie a knighthood) as an insult to beliefs and sanctions of over one billion Muslims worldwide, foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini said, adding that Tehran condemns such an unacceptable act.

Hosseini said, Rushdie, the apostate writer of the blasphemous book The Satanic Verses, was the initiator of a trend of insulting the Islamic sanctities in the West.

He regretted that Britain has awarded knighthood to a man who has notorious record of blaspheming Prophet Mohammad.

Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri had also warned last year that the terror network was preparing a “precise response” to Britain's decision to give Rushdie the highest civilian honour.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses.

Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece arguing that it was time to admit that those of us who had called for the book to be banned or pulped were wrong. Utterly wrong. It was understandable why many regarded and still do regard passages in The Satanic Verses to be so offensive, but that could not be used as a justification to try and prevent others from reading the book.

My piece got a mixed reaction from the Muslims I spoke to. Some agreed that the episode had been a disaster while others strongly disagreed with me and did not accept that a novelist should have the right to offend. I tried to explain that the right to offend did not imply that one agreed with what was being said – it was just that the writer should not be prevented from doing so as long as he was not breaking any laws.

This year I decided to send an email to members of one national Muslim organisation asking them for their own views on the matter. Here are excerpts from some of the responses that I received:

You cannot force people to respect you and it has resulted in the exact opposite reaction with all sorts of people lining up to insult and lampoon the prophet, Islam, the Qur'an and Muslims generally in the last two decades since.

I was 16 years old at the time and was perplexed over the issue. I knew that Rushdie had written an offensive book, but I found the Muslim protestors' response somewhat offensive too.

Some months back I had dinner with a well-known British columnist who has some rather strident views about immigration and Islam. I asked him outright what it was that so annoyed him about Islam and he said it was what he viewed as the seemingly constant attempts by Muslims to try and restrict freedoms.

And regrettably, like it or not, that is the image too many people now have of Muslims.

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It was 20 years ago this month that Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie. I inform all zealous Muslims of the world, he proclaimed: that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses . . . and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its contents, are sentenced to death.

This was not just a brutally shocking act that forced Rushdie into hiding for almost a decade; it also helped to transform the character of British society. The Rushdie affair was the moment at which a new Islam dramatically announced itself as a political force — and the moment when Britain realised that it was facing a new kind of social conflict.

Muslim fury seemed to be driven not by harassment or discrimination, but by a sense of hurt that Rushdie's words had offended their deepest beliefs. Where did such hurt come from? How could a novel create such outrage? Could Muslim anguish be assuaged and should it be?

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Salman Rushdie is to write a book about the decade he spent in hiding while living under a fatwa issued by the then-Supreme Leader of Iran, Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.

Rushdie said: It's my story, and at some point it needs to be told. That point is getting closer, I think, added Rushdie.

Rushdie was forced into hiding in 1989 when Khomeini issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill the author, claiming that his book The Satanic Verses insulted Islam.

At one point the bounty on Rushdie's head rose to £1.8m. The Japanese translator of the work was killed, the Norwegian and Italian translators barely survived assassination attempts, and an attempt on the life of the Turkish translator in 1993 resulted in a riot causing the deaths of 37 intellectuals who had gathered in Sivas, Turkey, for a cultural festival.

D'Souza doubts that the book will be a straight diary. There are a huge number of incidents that people may not be aware of, she said. There were times when he was absolutely under threat. But he will make it into a novel of a kind.