Ron Davies- yours is the voice of reason. There is little place for it in this thread of mostly ignorant claims, suppositions, and knee-jerk reactions.
As a reviewer in the NY Times said at the time of the book's publication in North America (1989), "Some of the noisiest objections have been raised by people who have never read the book and have no intention of ever reading it. This opposition does little to educate a woefully ignorant and prejudiced Western public about the Islamic faith."

The book may be read surficially as a dreamlike novel of many parts, Rushdie's prose flows smoothly, often almost poetically; some of his writings are better heard than read, and a couple of the audiobook editions of earlier works are excellent. In this multi-layered book there is much to engage the reader who knows a little of the voluminous literature of the now Islamic region extending from southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean east into central Asia.

I have started to read the book, but slowly, with some aids at hand, because I would like to grasp Rushdie's implications and a little of his historical and philosophical knowledge, as well as the superficial story.

The NY Times reviewer of "Satanic Verses," A. G. Mojtabai, a writer in residence at the Univ. Tulsa at the time, exposes the multi-layered writing in the first paragraph of her review:
Salman Rushdie. author most famously of "Midnight's Children," opens his ...novel with a scene of human figures tumbling from the debris of a hijacked jumbo jetliner. The plane is named Bostan, which is both a Farsi word for garden and the title of the great didactic poem by the 13th c. Persian poet Sadi, proclaiming the virtues of justice, benevolence, self-restraint, gratitude, penitence and so on. This detail is not insignificant in Mr. Rushdie's work, where each act of naming is dense with implication. And the name "Bostan" might prompt us to ask, isn't this precisely what the fabled oriental garden has become in our day - a terrorized, disintegrating jumbo jet?"

(Dinner is calling- I will leave review of the controversial points of his book to my next post).