It implied very heavily that Muhammad was making it all up to suit himself, and portrayed him in a less than stellar light, as little more than a gangster. Basically, it suggested that Islam was a false religion and Muhammad an immoral fraud.
Rushdie had been warned by his agent and publisher not to publish The Satanic Verses, the title of which refers to the section of the Quran supposedly delivered to Muhammad by Satan, which revelation was that it was alright to worship some idolatrous false gods in addition to Allah. He didn't listen, buoyed up no doubt on the wave of critical acclaim that followed Midnight's Children (and rightly so, it's brilliant), and probably his slightly inflated sense of his own importance as a writer.
Needless to say, the Ayatollah of Iran, and millions of Muslims were unimpressed with Rushdie's criticism of their prophet and religion, and he was sentenced to death in absentia, and spent the next few years in hiding, during which period he even attempted to apologise and claim he'd gone back to practising Islam, which was probably an understandable action from a frightened man, but not one that showed a lot of integrity, given Rushdie's well-known and published scorn for religion and Islam in particular.
I've got this exact first edition in my bookcase at home. A good read, but not his best work, in my opinion.
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