Arise, Sir Salman. Quite a signal has been sent by Prime Minister Blair and the British government, in the face of efforts at intimidation by Islamists, with the decision to award the author Salman Rushdie with a knighthood, an honor traditionally given to those who represent the best in Britain. Sir Salman joins illustrious company. Among the ranks of beknighted writers are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sir James Barrie, Sir Pelham Wodehouse, Sir Noel Coward, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, and many more, including that most perfect knight and Nobel literature laureate, Sir Winston Churchill.

It was the fatwa issued against Sir Salman in 1989 by the leader of the Iranian Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, that for many in the West first brought home the nature of the Islamist threat to our way of life and the sentiments we hold dear. Sir Salman had not only dared in a work of fiction, “The Satanic Verses,” put words in the mouth of the prophet Mohammed but had suggested that the prophet had smoked hashish.

For this the writer was for nearly a decade obliged to become a recluse, hiding from the threat of assassination, protected by armed police as he ducked from safe house to safe house, until at last the Iranian mullahs relented and deigned to release him from their grasp. For a large part of that decade Sir Salman made his life in New York City, where he could be found eating out and living a more regular, less threatened life than he could in London.

Born into a Muslim household in Mumbai, though he now describes himself as an atheist, Sir Salman first came to prominence with “Midnight’s Children,” a novel that explored how two boys, one Muslim, one Hindu, found themselves obliged to go their different ways in 1947 at the partition of British India into democratic India and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The book was an overnight success and is credited with spawning a whole literary genre of books written in English by descendants of those who were born into the British Empire.

Prime Minister Thatcher’s response in 1989 to the Iranian threat to one of Britain’s most prominent authors was to stand firm and break off diplomatic relations with Iran, though her government was less well served by its Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who declared that the fuss was unnecessary and unfortunate, not least because, in his opinion, the book was not very good. Happily, Lady Thatcher was less interested in Sir Geoffrey’s ideas of literary merit than in the threat on the life of one of her citizens. There were few complaints in Britain about the cost of round the clock protection for an author who had exercised a basic right, that of free speech.

What Mr. Blair’s government has made clear by elevating Sir Salman to a knighthood, at a time when other European leaders are trying to accommodate by fudge the threat of Islamist terrorism in their midst, is that Britain, at least, will not be cowed. Nor is this just about the courage of Sir Salman, who, even for the many who do not share his views, has for so long personified the threat to all victims of Islamic intolerance. Mr. Blair’s action is welcome because he has sent a signal to the mullahs of Iran and terror masters that the West will stand with the individuals they target — and will honor those who carry their struggle with the pen that, if mightier, is also more civilized.