On
Valentine’s Day, 1989, Salman Rushdie woke to the news that he had been
sentenced to death in a fatwa delivered by the Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran.
From his deathbed, the Ayatollah had declared Rushdie’s latest novel, The Satanic Verses, blasphemous, for
depicting a religion like Islam, and a character similar to the Prophet Muhammad.
The Ayatollah had never read the book.
For the
next thirteen years, Rushdie, celebrated author of the Booker of Bookers
winning novel, Midnight’s Children,
lived under the protection of the British government. During that time, public support
often waxed against him. Rushdie was declared a trouble-maker, who did not
deserve protection. The British media painted Rushdie as a villain, who had
deliberately attacked one of the world’s largest religions for his own personal
gain, and who now enjoyed the lavish protection of the British government, on
the British taxpayer’s pound, and then became dismissive of the men who
protected him.
Rushdie
tells a different story. Rushdie was forced to move from house to house, by the
upper-echelon of British intelligence, because they feared that, if his
location became known, he would be impossible to protect. Each move cost
Rushdie personally. He rented the homes he lived in long-term, and he lost a
lot of money each time he was uprooted before his lease had ended. Throughout
his memoir, Rushdie declares his unwavering appreciation for the men assigned
to protect them. He was not some callous villain, and he had not meant to
insult the religion of Islam. Yes. He was an apostate. Yes. He was an atheist.
Yes. He found it more and more difficult, as the fatwa years continued, to
believe that organized religions were what they claimed to be. But, when he
wrote The Satanic Verses, he had
simply followed his art. His representation
of the religion-that-was-like-Islam and the man-who-was-similar-to-the-Prophet
were largely positive, throughout his novel. Yes. Characters in the novel had
spoken ill of the religion and its Prophet, but those characters were enemies
of the religion, and had been persecuting it. Verisimilitude demanded that
their criticisms be dismissive and disparaging.
Rushdie
tells a story, in which he was not abandoned by his friends, though the media
had said that his novel had scared off all his friends. In fact, friends lent
him their homes as safe havens when he was without a place to live. They
continued to include him in their social activities, and they protected his
whereabouts. His friends, and even people who had only been acquaintances
before the fatwa, showed that humanity could answer injustice with solidarity
and love.
Eventually,
the fatwa became a political obstacle to Iran, and slowly, Rushdie was able to
emerge from hiding as the threat against him diminished. The fatwa years,
however, were not peaceful. Buildings were bombed; intrepid and pedestrian
translators and publishers were attacked; hit squads were deployed and foiled. The
British government, in Rushdie’s estimation, was hesitant to enforce sanctions
against Iran, but eventually they did negotiate on his behalf. Rushdie was told
by his protection officers that his protection was being handled differently
than any other protection detail they had ever been on. Rushdie became
convinced that some of the officials handling his case wanted to punish him,
because they believed that he had sought trouble. Bureaucracy is always in
flux, and his situation did get better. In the interim, Rushdie and his
supporters worldwide lobbied other European governments and the United States.
They fought to raise awareness throughout the world, emphasizing that this was
state-sponsored terrorism, that this was an infringement on the democratic
right to free speech. In the end, they won over governments abroad, and a more
receptive government came into power at home.
The
fatwa years altered Rushdie’s literary life. He wrote little, and what he did
write, though its subject-matter was innocuous, faced an almost impenetrable
scrutiny from his publishers. Lobbying foreign governments, the European Union,
and the United Nations became a full-time job. He wanted to raise awareness,
not only for his own situation, but for writers being silenced and murdered in
the Islamic world. He often found it difficult to sit down and write. When he
did write, however, he wrote well, for the most part. U2 supported his cause,
and Bono took the lyrics for the song “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” directly
from Rushdie’s novel of the same name. Rushdie also produced the children’s
story Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
and his novel, The Moor’s Last Sigh,
during the fatwa years.
Overall,
the memoir is interesting. There are some slow parts throughout the book, but
Rushdie does a good job of keeping the large book lively. At times, I found it
hard to relate to Rushdie as a person. His atheism and rather lax approach to
marriage conflicted with my own beliefs, and, at times, his political views
rubbed me the wrong way. Nonetheless, his story deserved to be heard. His story
needed to be heard. Most appropriately, Rushdie chose himself to tell his own
story. He elects to tell that story in the third person, which gives him more
space to reflect on himself, his motives, and his own reaction to situation. Rushdie
imposes a critical distance between his present self and his self during the
fatwa years, and is able to tell his story in an effective way. The memoir is
framed well, beginning with an act of terrorism against an individual, and
ending (almost) with an act of terrorism against a society. Rushdie’s memoir
spans the years of growing international terrorism, and shows how much the
world has changed in a short span of decades. His memoir shows how important it
is to live in a free society, and how easily that freedom can be infringed on
by those who dislike what your freedom tells them. Rushdie’s book is about
life, and free-speech; it is about the power of injustice, and that of justice.
JCM
9 March 2013
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