Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  I have had to understand not just what I am fighting against—in this situation, that’s not very hard—but also what I am fighting for, what is worth fighting for with one’s life. Religious fanaticism’s scorn for secularism and for unbelief led me to my answer. It is that values and morals are independent of religious faith, that good and evil come before religion: that—if I may be permitted to say this in the house of God—it is perfectly possible, and for many of us even necessary, to construct our ideas of the good without taking refuge in faith. That is where our freedom lies, and it is that freedom, among many others, which the fatwa threatens, and which it cannot be allowed to destroy.

  [From an article that was not, in the end, offered for publication, April 1993]

  On Monday, February 22, the prime minister’s office announced that Mr. Major had agreed in principle to a meeting with me, as a demonstration of the government’s determination to stand up for freedom of expression and for the right of its citizens not to be murdered by thugs in the pay of a foreign power. More recently a date was set for that meeting. Immediately a vociferous Tory backbench campaign sought to have the meeting canceled, because of its interference with Britain’s “partnership” with the murderous mullahs of Tehran. The date—which I had been assured was “as firm as can be”—has today been postponed without explanation. By a curious coincidence, a proposed British trade delegation to Iran in early May can now take place without embarrassment. Iran is hailing this visit—the first such mission in the fourteen years since the Khomeini revolution—as a “breakthrough” in relations. Its news agency states that the British have promised that lines of credit will be made available.

  It is becoming harder to retain confidence in the Foreign Office’s decision to launch a new “high-profile” international initiative against the notorious fatwa. For not only are we scurrying off to do business with the tyrannical regime that the U.S. administration calls an “international outlaw” and brands as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but we also propose to lend that regime the money with which to do business with us. Meanwhile, I gather I am to be offered a new date for my little meeting. But nobody from Number 10 Downing Street has spoken or written to me.

  The Tory “anti-Rushdie” pressure group—its very description demonstrates its members’ desire to turn this into an issue of personality rather than principle—includes Sir Edward Heath and Emma Nicholson, as well as that well-known apologist for Iranian interests Peter Temple-Morris. *20 Emma Nicholson tells us that she has grown to “respect and like” the Iranian regime (whose record of killing, maiming, and torturing its own people has recently been condemned by the United Nations as being among the worst in the world), while Sir Edward, still protected by Special Branch because, twenty years ago, the British people suffered under his disastrous premiership, criticizes the decision to offer similar protection to a fellow Briton who is presently in greater danger than himself.

  All these persons agree on one point: the crisis is my fault. Never mind that over two hundred of the most prominent Iranians in exile have signed a statement of absolute support for me. That writers, thinkers, journalists, and academics throughout the Muslim world—where the attack upon dissenting, progressive, and above all secularist ideas is daily gathering force—have told the British media that “to defend Rushdie is to defend us.” That The Satanic Verses, a legitimate work of the free imagination, has many defenders (and where there are at least two views, why should the book-burners have the last word?), or that its opponents have felt no need to understand it.

  Iranian officials have admitted that Khomeini never so much as saw a copy of the novel. Islamic jurisprudents have stated that the fatwa contradicts Islamic law, never mind international law. Meanwhile, the Iranian press has awarded a prize of sixteen gold pieces and a pilgrimage to Mecca for a cartoon “proving” that The Satanic Verses is not a novel at all but a carefully engineered Western conspiracy against Islam. Does this whole affair not feel, at times, like the blackest of black comedy—a circus sideshow enacted by murderous clowns?

  In the last four years I have been slandered by many people. I do not intend to keep turning the other cheek. If it was proper to attack those on the Left who were the fellow-travelers of Communism, and those on the Right who sought to appease the Nazis, then the friends of revolutionary Iran—businessmen, politicians, or British fundamentalists—deserve to be treated with equal contempt.

  I believe we have reached a turning point. Either we are serious about defending freedom, or we are not. If we are, then I hope Mr. Major will very soon be willing to stand up and be counted as he has promised. I should very much like to discuss with him how pressure on Iran can be increased—in the European Commission, through the Commonwealth and the UN, at the International Court of Justice. Iran needs us more than we need Iran. Instead of quaking when the mullahs threaten to cut trade links, let us be the ones to turn the economic screws. I have discovered, in my conversations across Europe and North America, widespread all-party interest in the idea of a ban on offering credit to Iran, as a first stage. But everyone is waiting for the British government to take a lead. In today’s London Times, however, Bernard Levin suggests that fully two-thirds of all Tory MPs would be delighted if Iranian assassins succeeded in killing me. If these MPs truly represent the nation—if we are so shruggingly unconcerned about our liberties—then so be it: lift the protection, disclose my whereabouts, and let the bullets come. One way or the other. Let’s make up our minds.

  [From The Observer, July 1993]

  I met the writer and journalist Mr. Aziz Nesin in 1986, when I took part in an event organized by British writers to protest against the Turkish authorities’ decision to confiscate his passport. I hope that Mr. Nesin remembers my small effort on his behalf, because recently he has done me no favors at all. Mr. Nesin is now editor-in-chief of the Turkish newspaper Aydinlik, and a publisher. Recently Aydinlik began the publication of extracts from The Satanic Verses, “to promote debate and discussion.” These extracts appeared over a period of weeks, under the heading “Salman Rushdie—Thinker or Charlatan?” At no time did Mr. Nesin or Aydinlik seek my permission to publish any extracts. Nor did they discuss with me what extracts would be used, or allow me to confirm the accuracy or quality of the translation. I never saw the published texts. Ever since 1989, Iranian mullahs and Islamic zealots around the world have been quoting and reproducing decontextualized segments of The Satanic Verses to use as propaganda weapons in the larger war against progressive ideas, secularist thought, and the modern world, a war in which the so-called Rushdie affair is no more than a skirmish. I was appalled to find that these Turkish secularists and anti-fundamentalists were using my work in exactly the same unscrupulous fashion, albeit to serve different political purposes. Once again, I was a pawn in somebody else’s game.

  I asked my agents to write to Mr. Nesin and ask: why had his newspaper pirated my work? What were his motives for wishing to publish me in the first place? Was he, for example, interested in my work as a writer? And if, as he claimed, he had fought on behalf of writers’ rights for many years, would he be prepared to protest against Aydinlik’s infringement of those rights? After a long silence, Nesin’s reply was to print my agents’ letter in Aydinlik together with a riposte that must rank as one of the most malicious, untruthful and, paradoxically, revealing texts I have ever read. He scolded me for daring to ask about his motives and then said that he didn’t care about my situation: “What concern is Salman Rushdie’s cause to me?” He further said that he had asked for permission to publish only as a courtesy. If we refused, he said, “I will be forced to publish the book without your sanction . . . you may take us to court.”

  Plainly, Nesin and his associates wished to use me, and my work, as cannon fodder in their struggle against religious zealotry in Turkey. And here is where I find myself in difficulties. For I, too, am a committed secularist. I, too, deplore, and have used every opportunity in the last five years to
struggle against, the spread of religious fanaticism across the face of the earth. Only last week I was able to attend a gathering in Paris of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, an organization created by President Mitterrand under the presidency of the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and attended by, among others, Wole Soyinka, Umberto Eco, Cynthia Ozick, the great Arab poet Adonis, and, from Turkey, the novelist Yashar Kemal. As members of this académie we spent a good part of the day protesting against attacks on secularists by fundamentalists in Algeria, Egypt, and, yes, Turkey. I have believed from the beginning that the true context of the attack on The Satanic Verses was this wider war. But Mr. Nesin did not see me as a combatant. For him, my work was simply a weapon, to use as he saw fit.

  Now, tragically, Mr. Nesin has been involved in a violent confrontation with the fundamentalists in Sivas, Turkey. The news reports say he is alive. *21 But many, many people are dead. And the newspaper reports call this a “Rushdie riot.” It is hard to express how I feel today.

  However, we must not fail to lay the blame for these horrible killings where it truly belongs. Murder is murder, and the guilt for the crime must be laid at the feet of the criminals. And the criminals are, of course, the religious zealots who hounded a meeting of secularist writers, who set fire to their hotel and then prevented the rescue services from reaching the scene. I am utterly appalled by these God-driven mobs and by their wild lust for the blood of unbelievers, and I send my grief, my sympathy, and my outraged support to the families of the dead; to all those who fight against religious bigots; yes, also to Mr. Aziz Nesin.

  Will any good come out of this tragedy? Will the world’s leaders, now assembling for the G7 meeting in Japan, assume the moral responsibility of saying, enough is enough, terrorism cannot be supported, and countries that promote it, that train and arm and finance the killers, that point fingers across the world and demand the heads of innocent men, will suffer for their misdeeds? Will the much-spoken-of New World Order be a triumph of cynicism, of business-as-usualism, of naked greed and raw power? Or might we, at last, start to draw the lines of a more humane society and inform terrorist states that their immoral acts will have political and economic consequences? I hope that every journalist arriving in Tokyo will ask the G7 politicians to condemn the fanatical murderers of Sivas, and their “spiritual” leaders and paymasters too. These are not only the enemies of secularists and Westerners; they are also the real enemies of Islam.

  [This article appeared in The New York Times in July 1993 under the title “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam”]

  The following news stories are all taken from the first half of 1993.

  In Pakistan, an elderly poet, Akhtar Hameed Khan, seventy-eight, is quoted as saying that while he admires Muhammad, his real inspiration has been Buddha. He denies saying this but is nevertheless accused by mullahs of blasphemy. In 1992, he had been arrested for insulting the Prophet’s descendants by writing a poem about animals that the fundamentalists alleged had hidden, allegorical meanings. He managed to beat that charge, but now, once again, his life is in danger.

  In Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, an Indian theater group who in 1992 performed a play entitled Corpse-Eating Ants, which was held to be blasphemous, and who had been sentenced to six-year jail sentences for blasphemy, appeal against the sentence. Some members of the group are freed, but one has his sentence increased to ten years, and another has his six-year term upheld by the appeals court.

  In Istanbul, one of the country’s most respected secularist journalists, Ugur Mumçu, is gunned down in the street. Turkish fundamentalists take credit for the attack, and the Turkish government says it has evidence linking the murderers to Iran. The interior minister, Ismet Sezgin, says that at least three killings have been carried out by a group called Islamic Movement, whose members have been trained in assassination techniques “at an official Iranian facility between Tehran and Qom.”

  In Egypt, the assassins who in 1992 murdered the distinguished secular thinker Farag Fouda are currently being tried; however, extremist bombings and killings continue.

  In Algeria, the writer Tahar Djaout is one of six secularists murdered in a killing spree by what the security forces call “Muslim terrorists.”

  In Saudi Arabia, a number of distinguished intellectuals forms the country’s first human-rights group. Within days, many of them are fired from their posts, including university professorships; many of them are arrested and jailed. Trials are pending.

  In Egypt, Professor Nasr Abu-Zeid, who teaches literature at Cairo University, is charged with apostasy because of his criticisms of the Islamists. Fundamentalists ask the courts to dissolve his marriage, since it is illegal for a Muslim to be married to an apostate. The alternative would be for his wife to be stoned to death as an adulteress.

  In Turkey, thirty-six secularist writers, dancers, musicians, and artists gathered for a conference in the town of Sivas are burned to death in their hotel by a mob of Islamic fundamentalists which accuses them of being atheists and therefore, in the fanatics’ view, deserving of being burned alive.

  The United States has recently become all too painfully familiar with the nature of the holy—or, rather, unholy—terrorists of Islam. The crater beneath the World Trade Center and the uncovering of a plot to set off more gigantic bombs and to assassinate leading political figures have shown Americans how brutal these extremists can be. These and other cases of international Islamic terrorism have shocked the world community; whereas the cases of domestic terrorism previously listed have captured relatively little of the world’s “share of mind.” I should like to suggest that this imbalance in our attention represents a kind of victory for fanaticism. If the worst, most reactionary, most medievalist strain in the Muslim world is treated as the authentic culture, so that the bombers and the mullahs get all the headlines while progressive, modernizing voices are treated as minor, marginal, “Westoxicated”—as small news—then the fundamentalists are being allowed to set the agenda.

  The truth is that there is a great struggle in progress for the soul of the Muslim world, and as the fundamentalists grow in power and ruthlessness, those courageous men and women who are willing to engage them in a battle of ideas and of moral values are rapidly becoming as important for us to know about, to understand, and to support as once the dissident voices in the old Soviet Union used to be. The Soviet terror-state, too, denigrated its opponents as being overly Westernized and enemies of the people; it, too, took men from their wives in the middle of the night, as the poet Osip Mandelstam was taken from Nadezhda. We do not blame Mandelstam for his own destruction; we do not blame him for attacking Stalin, but rather, and rightly, we blame Stalin for his Stalin-ness. In the same spirit, let us not fall into the trap of blaming the Sharjah theater-folk for their rather macabre-sounding ants, or Turkish secularists for “provoking” the mob that murdered them.

  Rather, we should understand that secularism is now the fanatics’ Enemy Number One, and its most important target. Why? Because secularism demands a total separation between Church and State; philosophers such as the Egyptian Fouad Zakariya argue that free Muslim societies can exist only if this principle is adhered to. And because secularism rejects the idea that any society of the late twentieth century can be thought of as “pure,” and argues that the attempt to purify the modern Muslim world of its inevitable hybridities will lead to equally inevitable tyrannies. And because secularism seeks to historicize our understanding of the Muslim verities: it sees Islam as an event within history, not outside it. And because secularism seeks to end the repressions against women that are instituted wherever the radical Islamists come into power. And, most of all, because secularists know that a modern nation-state cannot be built upon ideas that emerged in the Arabian desert over thirteen hundred years ago.

  The weapons used against the dissidents of the Muslim world are everywhere the same. The accusations are always of “blasphemy,” “apostasy,” “heresy,” “un-Islamic activities.�
�� These “crimes” are held to “insult Islamic sanctities.” The “people’s wrath,” thus aroused, becomes “impossible to resist.” The accused become persons whose “blood is unclean” and therefore deserves to be spilled.

  The British writer Marina Warner once pointed out that the objects associated with witchcraft—a pointed hat, a broomstick, a cauldron, a cat—would have been found in most women’s possession during the great witch-hunts. If these were the proofs of witchcraft, then all women were potentially guilty; it was only necessary for accusing fingers to point at one and cry, “Witch!” Americans, remembering the example of the McCarthyite witch-hunts, will readily understand how potent and destructive the process can still be. And what is happening in the Muslim world today must be seen as a witch-hunt of exceptional proportions, a witch-hunt being carried out in many nations, and often with murderous results. So the next time you stumble across a story such as the ones I’ve repeated here, perhaps a story tucked away near the bottom of an inside page in this newspaper, remember that the persecution it describes is not an isolated act—that it is part of a deliberate, lethal program, whose purpose is to criminalize, denigrate, and even to assassinate the Muslim world’s best, most honorable voices: its voices of dissent. And remember that those dissidents need your support. More than anything, they need your attention.

  [From a letter to The Independent, July 1993]

  I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that the world community’s shameful response to the continuing annihilation of the Bosnian Muslims is in some way connected to their being Muslims. It is worth mentioning, however, that outrage at this fact is by no means confined to the Muslim community—if only because, according to your correspondent Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the “underlying issue” is that “for years the majority of Muslims have felt misunderstood and demonised in the West. . . . Bosnia is seen as the culmination of their process of alienation.”