Knighthood is now an honour bestowed by the British monarch on persons distinguished in government service, professions and arts. Although this is the only title conferred by a ceremony in which the sovereign and the subject take part in person, the sovereign usually confers the title on the recommendation of the British government.

As a result, it is not immune to scandals and controversies. But the furore caused by the recent knighting of Salman Rushdie has been rather unusual. Why?

Ahmed Salman Rushdie comes from a privileged background. He was born in India sixty years ago in a wealthy Muslim family. His father sent him to England to pursue his studies there. He read History and got an M.A. from the University of Cambridge. While working as a professional advertising copywriter in London, he started writing newspaper and magazine articles on a variety of subjects as a hobby. His prose was so provocative that it soon attracted the attention of the critics. But he did not become well known as a writer until the publication of his novel Midnight's Children in 1981which won the prestigious Booker Prize.

The book that made him really famous and at the same time an internationally controversial figure, was his third novel The Satanic Verses, which was published in 1988. While The Satanic Verses was acclaimed by critics in the West as a first rate magical realist novel, it was denounced in most of the Muslim world as blasphemous because of the magical realist representation of the origins of Islam. In his novel, Rushdie challenged the fundamentalist believers' inclination to accept literally the beliefs of a revealed religion.

What is magical realism? According to Professors Parkinson Zamora and Faris: "In magical realist texts, ontological disruption serves the purpose of political and cultural disruption: magic is often given cultural corrective, requiring readers to scrutinise accepted realistic conventions of causality, materiality, motivation … Magical realist texts are subversive: their in-betweenness, their all-at-onceness encourages resistance to monologic political and cultural structures, a feature that has made the mode particularly useful to writers in post-colonial cultures and increasingly, to women."

No doubt, Rushdie's fiction has a subversive streak. It is innovative as well as provocative. "If no single reality exists, then no world view or belief system is definitively correct, no society can be deemed permanent or stable and fantasy disturbs what has been taken to be real, tracing a space within society's cognitive frame."

Viewed from a fundamentalist perspective, no matter whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, it is inevitably judged as irreverent and subversive. This was the reason why Iran's ayatollahs issued a fatwa condemning him to death in 1989 and Rushdie had to go into hiding.

The fatwa was lifted in 1998. If Rushdie was rebellious and irreverent before the fatwa, he became a die-hard reactionary after that. Before the fatwa he questioned everything and everybody. At a certain point of his young career, he had abandoned "a closed world of certainties" to live "in an infinite world of questions."

In the early part of his career he used his brilliant prose and stinging satire to criticise many of the British institutions. He wrote intensely against British immigration policy, hypocrisy, colonialism, racism, false multiculturalism, and Thatcherism.

If there was any South Asian writer who aroused the ire of the British conservative media in the seventies and the eighties, it was Salman Rushdie.

Unfortunately, now he has become his master's voice. He has become a modern-day Torquemada. Worst of all, he has lost all objectivity by singling out Islam as the target of his venomous attacks. Although he is not yet considered a neo-con, he seems to subscribe to the American fundamentalist ideology.

He has given his whole-hearted support to Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. His views on modernity, violence, Islam and the West are completely one-sided. He has come to accept universal human values like freedom and tolerance as wholly Western ones and identify Islam alone with violence and tyranny. If Rushdie's objective is to start a reform movement in Islam, this is definitely not the way to go about it.

Muslims have every right to express their disagreements about Rushdie's writings, but violent reactions like book burnings and death threats by some over-zealous Muslims are, in my opinion, counter-productive because they provide opportunities to the renegades and a certain section of the Western media (who are already too eager to criticise Islam and the Muslims) to tarnish the image of Islam itself as being violent and intolerant.

True, these same Islam-bashers would never think of passing similar sweeping judgments on Christianity or Judaism because of Bush or Sharon's brutal policies in the Middle East. Like Christianity and Judaism, Islam is a great religion. It is strong enough to withstand criticisms and recriminations. No one should forget that Islam has a long history of accommodation of other beliefs and tolerance of differences.

Chaklader Mahboob-ul Alam is a columnist for The Daily Star.