For Original Visit Above Link
Salman Rushdie:
His life, his work and his religion
And so it begins again: the low rumble of
Islamist death-threats against a novelist, simply because he dares to revel in
free speech and free thought in a free society. "We're all living under a
fatwa now," Salman Rushdie sighs, listing his persecutors' long slew of
victims, from Algerian novelists to Bali clubbers to Circle Line commuters.
"You can see the fatwa as the overture to 9/11. It's not a direct line.
Maybe you could say it was not the same piece of music. But in some way it was
a harbinger - a small thing before a big thing. The first crow, you know,
flying across the sky."
As we sit in the basement of a lush London
hotel he reflects, with calm dignity, on the massed millions of the fanatical
who wish to behead him, simply because they think something one of his
characters says in a dream in a novel insults a man who died 1,300 years ago.
"It was beyond... I can't tell you," he says, a rare moment when his
sentences stutter. "I've tried, quite hard, as an act of will, to put it behind
me, because I don't want to carry that weight around. And, fortunately, [my
wife] Padma didn't experience it. I met her at the tail-end of it, before the
Iranians rescinded [the fatwa, in 1998]. That helps."
But Rushdie has been forced to get used to
life in a damp mental alleyway where the loudest death-threat in history is
forever echoing. One morning, a few days after the fatwa, he woke up and
switched on the television to see a British studio audience voting on whether
he should be killed. He switched the channel to see tens of thousands of people
in Pakistan, a country he had lived in and loved, burning his effigy. He was,
he says, "put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal
and specific worthlessness".
One time, he had to go to hospital to have
his wisdom teeth extracted. Afterwards he learnt that the police had
contingency plans to remove him if there was an emergency: he would have been
carried out in a body bag, in a hearse.
When I arrived at this hotel and waited in
the lobby, a strange unspoken conspiracy emerged between me and the
receptionist. "There should be a room booked for... uh... Random House
books," I said. "Oh yes - the... um... author interview?" Like
in some cod James Bond plot, we did not utter his name, as though, almost 18
years after the Ayatollah Khomeini first uttered his call for murder, there are
assassins waiting on every London corner for a whisper of his name.
And then Rushdie wandered in, bearing a
pile of books, looking like a bustling media don rather than a
jihadi-dream-target, with no burly security guards, nobody except a slender
press agent hobbling along on crutches. I glance at the receptionist; our
silence seems stupid. As we wait for the room, Rushdie chattily talks me
through the photo-books he is carrying. "I've just had my picture taken by
this guy," he says. I want to hold on to this sliver of normality, to talk
about photographers and Borges and Marquez. But the fatwa seems to block out
the sky, still.
We walk downstairs and out it tumbles -
the story of the plot to kill him. When he first heard the Ayatollah Khomeini's
call for him to be killed - on 14 February 1989, "my unfunny
Valentine" - Rushdie's first thought was: "I'm a dead man." One
of his recent characters has a pre-assassination vision "of his open
grave, of a rectilinear black hole huddling in the ground, as empty as his
life, and felt the darkness measuring him for his shroud".
This battle was agony for Rushdie, not
just because he was wrenched away from his wife, his young child, and the
countries and cultures that had always nourished him, but because, as he puts
it, "the warring halves of the world - East and West - were also the
warring halves of my soul" . He is "the bastard child of
history", one of the great hybrid-children produced by the mass migrations
of the 20th century. He was raised in the East, schooled in the West, and
indelibly crafted by both. Salman Rushdie lives and writes on the great global
fault-line - and a fault-line is always a dangerous place to be.
Less than 48 hours after I spoke to him,
the tectonic plates rumbled and cracked a little more. Rushdie told the BBC
that the battle against the veil was a battle for the freedom of Muslim women
like his sisters. "Sheikh" Omar Bakri retorted gloatingly from Lebanon:
"Rushdie will continue living his life in hiding. Any fatwa will stand
until it is fulfilled. He is always going to be worried about a Muslim reaching
him." The message was old and simple and savage. This will never be over.
But Rushdie's stories rarely begin in the
middle of the action. He teases out their roots, in places long ago and far
away. This story is no different. Before we get to the fatwa, we must burrow
into the origins of this story, which lie in a gentler, saner Islam, one that
is being steadily subsumed by fanaticism across the globe. It begins in the
Edenic valley of Kashmir, more than 80 years ago...
I: In the
beginning: A Kashmiri grandfather, and a different Islam
Two of Rushdie's stories begin here: the
story of his life, and the story of his shimmering latest novel, Shalimar the
Clown. He describes Kashmir as "a tiny valley of no more than five million
souls, landlocked, pre-industrial, resource rich but cash poor, perched
thousands of feet up in the mountains, like a tasty green sweetmeat caught in a
giant's teeth". This was the backdrop for the meeting of Rushdie's
maternal grandparents. "My grandmother was very fierce and gruff. She was
quite small but she was very wide," he chuckles. "I've always thought
that one of the reasons my books are full of ferocious women is because of my
granny."
But it was his Kashmiri grandfather who
would surprise Rushdie's wannabe assassins. "He was a very devout Muslim.
He said his prayers every day five times a day without fail, despite the
teasing of his terrible grandchildren, and he went on Haj to Mecca," he
explains. "He sort of affected gruffness, but he didn't fool anybody. He
was a much beloved figure in [the town of] Aligar, where he was a family
doctor. He was a very familiar spectacle on the streets, bicycling around the
city going about his daily rounds. When I was a little boy, I used to sit on
the back, on the pillion, and see everyone waving to him."
But this devout Muslim was the antithesis
of the book-burners who now attack his grandson. He remains, to Rushdie,
"the model of tolerance. Whenever I think about open-mindedness, I think
about him. You could sit there as an 11- or 12-year-old boy and say, 'Grandfather,
I don't believe in god.' And he would say, 'Really? That's very interesting.
Sit down here and tell me all about it.' And there would be no kind of attempt
to ram something down your throat or criticise you. There would just be
conversation."
This culture of enlightenment - of free,
open dispute - led his grandfather to take him to the university library,
"which for me as a small boy was wonderful to explore, with those giant,
towering bookstacks, with those ladders you had to climb up. In my memory, I would
take out great stacks of Agatha Christie and PG Wodehouse, which he would sign
out very seriously along with his medical textbooks."
And this easy rationality shaped the lives
of Rushdie's parents too. His father found it confusing that the Koran was so
obviously "a bit jumbled up - when you read it, the chapter suddenly
changes direction, and 70 pages later, the chapter you were reading suddenly,
arbitrarily continues". It was clear to him the text had been incorrectly
assembled, and he wanted to go through and rearrange the text so that it made a
bit more sense - the Islamic equivalent to Thomas Jefferson's rationalist
adaptation of the Bible. Rushdie sips some fizzy water and says: "Now I
think... it's lucky he didn't do it."
Although they were "almost totally
irreligious", people who would visit the mosque three times a year, his
parents at some point decided to hire a religious teacher to come to their
house and educate Rushdie and his sisters. He says: "Unfortunately, they
had also brought us up as extremely irreverent children. It was their fault for
raising us as devilish infidels! So myself and my sisters gave this poor guy
such a hard time that after about two lessons, he told my parents that he
didn't know what to do. And to their immense credit, they said, 'All right,
then,' and gave up."
But the Kashmir of Rushdie's grandfather
stands for him as an alternate Islam, a radically different way of being Muslim
to the Khomeinist and Bin Ladenite head-choppers - a religion of peace, not a
religion of pieces. "It's really not so long ago," he says, "and
if it's not that long ago, it doesn't have to be gone for ever." As he
shows in Shalimar the Clown, Kashmiri Islam was - until the 1960s - a model of
pluralist tolerance. It mingled and mixed with Hinduism, with mullahs even
compromising on their austere monotheism by directing their followers to
worship at the shrines of the local Hindu saints. As he puts it: "To be
Kashmiri was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided."
"Indian Islam was like that - and in
many ways it still is," he adds. "Even at this moment, when there
have been explosions in a mosque or temple - it really hasn't worked. The
Muslim population in India is, largely speaking, not radicalised. From the
beginning they were always very secular-minded." Whereas the
radicalisation of Muslims in Britain is "dreadful", Indian Muslims
"are a model which could be beneficially studied about how you show a
minority community that their interests are best served by secular democracy,
and not by religious communal politics. Because if you play the game of
religious communal politics, you will always be outnumbered. That was the
argument Nehru and Gandhi took to India's religious minorities, and it
worked."
His grandfather's pluralist, peaceful
Kashmir has withered over the past 40 years under the burning heat of rival
fundamentalisms. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie uses the story of the shredding
of Kashmir's secularism - of the metaphorical death of his grandfather - as a microcosm
of a larger story, the collapse of the secular ideal across the world that has
nearly consumed Rushdie himself.
After the partition of India, Kashmir
found itself trapped between the two new nations, rubbing like a bed-sore. The
valley had a Muslim majority, so many people thought it logically should have
gone to the new Muslim state of Pakistan. But Kashmir's Hindu ruler decided to
stay with India, because he thought her secular traditions were best able to
prevent the valley breaking down into the ethnic cleansing that was causing the
new border to haemorrhage so much blood. And so the sharp wedge of communal
grievance entered Kashmir.
The mild, mystical Sufi brand of Islam
practised in the valley was gradually displaced by an austere Arab version -
Islam 3.0. The Indian government reacted with crazed violence, treating every
Kashmiri Muslim as a potential insurgent, and even using mass rape as a way to
"break" the population. The Muslim population became more
fundamentalist, the Indians ramped up the violence again - and on and on, in an
intensifying tango of death.
In the novel, Rushdie serves up the
response of the Indian government to Kashmiri separatism as "a case study
in how to fuck it up". The novel is littered with lines that could have
been uttered by an American general from the bloody sands of Iraq - endless
bragging about how many insurgents have been "taken out", followed by
confused confessions that this isn't bringing down the overall amount of
violence. "The trouble is, you don't even have to reach for it," he
says. "It's so obvious."
He fears that - in part as a result of
this - "the good guys are losing the battle within Islam. There's no
question. The Islam that now exists is not the Islam that I grew up with."
All over the novel, there drift bleak, depressive clouds where Rushdie seems to
fear that his grandfather's Kashmir - and the other brief patches of peace in
human history - are only short breaks in the story of a species determined to
tear itself apart. One character laments: "Maybe tyranny, forced
conversions, temple-smashing, iconoclasm, persecution and genocide were the
norms and peaceful coexistence was an illusion... Maybe peace was his opium
pipe-dream." Another comments that "the single most obvious truth
about the history of the human race" is "the inevitable triumph of
illusion over reality." As he hears these quotes, Rushdie nods. "Look
at history. It's not the account of a species at peace."
As he says this, Rushdie looks into the
distance with a dreamy sadness, as though he is still riding pillion on his
grandfather's bicycle, watching his world and his Islam creakily pedal into
oblivion.
II: "It's
not just about Palestine. It's about pork sandwiches, short skirts and kissing
too"
In the long shadow of the World Trade
Centre, Rushdie's story - of an Islam spiralling into spite - began to look
different. It was no longer possible to dismiss him as an exception; he became
a parable. For two decades, he has been scrambling to discover the moral to his
story, endlessly tracking the "labyrinthine paranoia of the jihadi
mind" as it tried to shred the secular values he knew and loved. The
Satanic Verses was his first attempt to understand the new hybrid-humans
midwifed by an age of mass migration - to ask what happens to the austere
values of the ninth century Arabian desert when they are plunged into the
swirling chaos of 20th-century London. In Shalimar the Clown, he ramps up this
black exploration, creating a hero who stabs a "blasphemous" novelist
in the neck and then heads to a jihadi training camp high in the Afghan hills.
For a time, Rushdie was optimistic about
what would emerge from this great churn of people across the globe. He became the
poet laureate of mongrelisation, a writer who rejoiced that "everywhere
was now part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives,
our stories, flowed into one another's, were no longer our own, individual,
discrete."
In 1985, he wrote - with soaring hope -
that "the effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new
types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places...
people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined
by others - by their otherness." But the gloriously disembodied,
pan-national ideology that emerged from this swirl turned out to be his
nemesis: Islamism. It is one of the many ironies in Rushdie's irony-strewn
life. He sees now that as well as softening and secularising Islam for some,
this uprooting has hardened Islam into a sharpened spike for more.
The mass uprooting he celebrated helped to
create the Islamist pining for a fictitious lost purity that is trying to kill
him, a desperate quest to recreate the Mecca of Mohammed in the world's cold
concrete jungles: "I have spent a lot of my life looking positively at the
consequences of migration. Now I'm being forced to see that there's a nightmare
as well as a dream."
Rushdie sees his career as falling into
three acts. In the first, he wrote about his lost homelands - India and
Pakistan. Then he wrote about the transition from that world to Britain, the
journey across water to the West. "And now I think that the third act is
to say, 'All right, all that happened,'" he explains. "The world has
become this mixed up place, the age of mass migration has taken place and we
live in its aftermath - now what?"
He fears that many people are wilfully
misunderstanding the new Islamist virus that has spread through this new world.
"People have been so knocked off balance by what's going on that their
normally well-functioning moral sense seems to have lost its footing."
After 18 years in the Islamist cross-hairs, Rushdie wants - needs - people to understand
that this new Islamic fundamentalism is not simply the lump sum of all the bad
things the West has done to Muslims, reflected back at us.
At the time of the fatwa, Rushdie was
widely known as a fierce and fearsome critic of US foreign policy, a man who
condemned Israel's "monstrous" occupation of Palestinian lands, a man
who damned Margaret Thatcher as " Mrs Torture" and warned that
"British society has never been cleansed of the filth of
imperialism". He risked his life traipsing through the jungles of
Nicaragua to expose Ronald Reagan's illegal funding of a horde of neo-fascist
guerrillas trying to topple the country's elected government.
It made no difference. He had questioned
the Official Story of Islam, trying to open it up to the mixed, metaphorical
dream-worlds of the modern metropolis - and for that, he had to be butchered.
"It's one thing to criticise the way in which the American government is
behaving, or the British government, and I have a lot of criticisms of that -
in fact, nothing but criticisms," he says now. "But it's another
thing to fail to see that an enemy actually exists and is extremely serious
about what he wishes to do.
"If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine
issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish
the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qa'ida by one jot. It's not what
they're after," he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans
forward. "Yes, it's a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see
there's an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but
it's not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life
on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look
like Taliban Afghanistan, then you're on the same side as them. If you don't
want that, you're not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That,
I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left."
Within this Talibanist morality, there is
room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie
shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent
boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed
"homosexual". "One of the great untold stories of al-Qa'ida is
that they are all these men who fuck little boys. They all have these disciples
who they're ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they're also
enjoying. For a while, then they go off - and they have their wives and
families at home. It's like Classical Greece." Does he think Osama bin
Laden has done it? "I wouldn't like to say," he says tactfully.
"He's an Arab, he's not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he's another
story..."
He senses soft racism in the refusal to
see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian
fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of
superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they
assume they cannot mean what they say. "One of the things that's commonly
said by Islamists is that it's acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a
place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die - that's
all bin Laden wants you to do. It's not just about Iraq, it's about ham
sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you're not married
to." He pauses. "It's about life."
It horrifies Rushdie that so many people
in his natural political home - the left - don't get it. They seem to imagine
that when people call for a novelist to be beheaded for blasphemy, they are
really calling for a return to the 1967 borders, or an independent Kashmir, or
an end to the occupation of Iraq. As he says this, I blurt out a repellent
question: was there a small part of him on September 11 that felt almost
relieved - that thought: "Now they'll understand"? He pauses, a long
pause, the only one in this interview. Have I offended him? But he answers with
the same contemplative calm as before. "It wasn't, actually. What an awful
thing to think. But... but I remember after 9/11 that a lot of people did
finally get it, and I remember thinking - it's a shame that 3,000 people had to
die for something pretty obvious to get through people's heads."
III: The quiet
American, and the art of slitting our own throats
Rushdie has looked down the barrel of
Islamism, smelt its cordite, and survived. So he is perpetually being asked -
how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs,
our cities? How do we scrape meaning from his misery? "When people ask me
how the West should adapt to Muslim sensitivities, I always say - the question
is the wrong way round. The West should go on being itself. There is nothing
wrong with the things that for hundreds of years have been acceptable - satire,
irreverence, ridicule, even quite rude commentary - why the hell not?
"But you see it every day, this
surrender," he says. He runs through a list of the theatres and galleries
that have censored themselves in the face of religious fundamentalist protests.
He mentions that the entire British media - from the BBC down - placed itself
in purdah during the Mohammed cartoons episode. "What I fear most is that,
when we look back in 25 years' time at this moment, what we will have seen is
the surrender of the West, without a shot being fired. They'll say that in the
name of tolerance and acceptance, we tied our own hands and slit our own
throats. One of the things that have made me live my entire life in these
countries is because I love the way people live here."
Rushdie sees surrender stamped on every
one of the "faith schools" being constructed by Tony Blair. "To
say the solution to the problems religion has caused is more religion... it's
just crazy," he says. It will only reinforce the sealing off of Muslims
from the world that is symbolised by the veil, which he sees as a hideous
anti-feminist shroud, "a one-woman tent".
And he has another blast at Blair: looking
to the United States as our anti-Islamist saviour is, he explains, a
"terrible mistake. America, like all superpowers, uses only the criterion
of self-interest. That's the way in which a superpower operates, whether it's
the Soviet Union or the United States. The criterion is what serves the
interests of the power. When that coincides with what we call liberal
democratic values then, yeah, it will be on that side. But superpowers of every
stripe have a history of installing puppets which will serve their interests.
Whether it's in Nicaragua, or the Shah of Iran. You can't look to a superpower
as a moral arbiter, because its job is not morality. Its job is the
preservation of its sphere of influence."
I ask what he thinks about Christopher
Hitchens' belief that the US has become a Jeffersonian superpower, bent on
spreading democracy across the globe. "It's not true. It's just not
true," he says. "You know, I met [Paul] Wolfowitz at Christopher's
house on one occasion. And Wolfowitz turned out to be a really nice man - very
charming, extremely intelligent, quite self-critical. Many things that you
might not have expected him to be. But false idealism, as we know from Graham
Greene, can be fantastically self-destructive." So Wolfowitz, a former
Deputy Secretary of Defense, is Alden Pyle, the Quiet American, wreaking havoc
in the name of righteousness? "Yes. I do think that someone in the name of
virtue can do terrible damage, for entirely virtuous reasons. But I've never
seen great power as having a moral dimension." Just after we meet, it is
estimated by The Lancet that 650,000 Iraqis have been killed due to Quiet
Americans (and Brits).
And the curse of amoral nuclear might
applies to another country Rushdie knows well - Pakistan. He says the situation
there is "scary, extremely scary" - much more so than the Iranian
near-bomb that rivets our headlines. His old country is, he says, "one
assassination away from having Islamic fanatics in charge of a functioning
nuclear weapon, which they may not mind using". Rushdie feels sick to be
"put into the position of hoping that Pervez Musharraf [the country's
dictator] has a long and healthy life just because - what is the old rhyme?
Keep a hold of nurse so you don't get something worse? Because behind Musharraf
there is the possibility of something much worse. He's an arsehole, a dictator,
no better than Zia, but in the ISI [the Pakistani security services] there are
people much worse, who want a very radical Islamist state."
And there is a serious, searing danger
they will wage war with India to reclaim - our conversation has come full
circle - Kashmir. It seems a cruelly bleak irony to end on: the possibility of
his grandfather's beloved symbol of peace, love and understanding, morphing in
one lifetime into the likeliest cause of nuclear war anywhere on earth. It's
our final note: his symbol of pluralism and tolerance, reduced to the brink of
becoming a smoking radioactive husk.
As we walk out on to the street,
exchanging jangling pleasantries after a gruelling conversation, it seems odd -
disturbing - to see him walking into a car alone. As he drives away, I think of
an old quote Rushdie is fond of. In Saul Bellow's novel The Dean's December,
the central character hears a dog barking wildly somewhere. He imagines the
barking is the dog's protest against the jarring limitations of dog experience.
"For God's sake," the dog is saying, "open the universe a little
more!"
That, too, is Rushdie's message in this
fight between the democratic-Muslim ideals of his grandfather and the
psychotic-Muslim delusions of his assassins. It is a fight between people who
want to open the universe a little more, and those who want to shrivel the
universe into the stultified vision of one book and one man who lived in a
desert more than a millennium ago.
