But for those few weeks in the fall of 1988 the book was still “only a novel,” and he was still himself. Viking UK gave a launch party for their autumn list and at it he met Robertson Davies and Elmore Leonard. He huddled in a corner with the two grand old men as Elmore Leonard told the story of how, after the devastation of his wife’s death, he had been wondering how he would ever find another life partner when he looked out of the window of his home in Bloomfield Township, just outside Detroit, and saw a woman standing there. Her name was Christine and she was a master gardener and she came to Bloomfield regularly to take care of Leonard’s garden. They got married within the year. “I didn’t know where I would find a wife,” he said, “and then I found her right outside my window, watering my plants.”
There was the usual round of readings and signings around Britain. He traveled to Toronto to speak at the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront. The Satanic Verses was short-listed for the Booker Prize alongside novels by Peter Carey, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, David Lodge and Penelope Fitzgerald. (He avoided calling Bruce to reopen the subject of sharing the award.) The only cloud on the horizon was Syed Shahabuddin, the Indian MP, demanding that action be taken in India against his “blasphemous” book, which he declared that he had not read, saying, “I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is,” which was a good point, about drains. It was briefly possible to ignore that cloud and enjoy publication (though, to tell the absolute truth, the publication of a book always made a large part of him want to hide behind the furniture). Then on Thursday, October 6, 1988, the cloud covered the sun. His friend Salman Haidar, whose family and his had been close for generations, and who was deputy high commissioner of India in London, had the tough job of calling him to tell him formally on behalf of his government that The Satanic Verses had been banned in India.
In spite of India’s much-trumpeted secularism, Indian governments from the mid-seventies onward—ever since the time of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi—had often given in to pressure from religious interest groups, especially those claiming to control large blocs of votes. By 1988, Rajiv Gandhi’s weak government, with elections due in November, cravenly surrendered to threats from two opposition Muslim MPs who were in no position to “deliver” the Muslim electorate’s votes to the Congress Party. The book was not examined by any properly authorized body, nor was there any semblance of judicial process. The ban came, improbably enough, from the Finance Ministry, under Section 11 of the Customs Act, which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic merit” of his work. Thanks a lot, he thought.
Strangely—innocently, naïvely, even ignorantly—he hadn’t expected it. In the years that followed, attacks on artistic freedom would multiply in India, and not even the most eminent would be spared: The painter Maqbool Fida Husain, the novelist Rohinton Mistry, the filmmaker Deepa Mehta would all be targeted, among many others. But in 1988 it was possible to believe in India as a free country in which artistic expression was respected and defended. He had believed it. Book banning was something that happened all too frequently across the border in Pakistan. It wasn’t the Indian way. Jawaharlal Nehru had written in 1929, “It is a dangerous power in the hands of a government; the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not.… In India, the power is likely to be misused.” The young Nehru was writing, at that time, against the censorship of books by India’s British overlords. It was sad to think that his words could be used, almost sixty years later, as a critique of India itself.
To be free one had to make the presumption of freedom. And a further presumption: that one’s work would be treated as having been created with integrity. He had always written presuming that he had the right to write as he chose, and presuming that it would at the very least be treated as serious work; and knowing, too, that countries whose writers could not make such presumptions inevitably slid toward, or had already arrived at, authoritarianism and tyranny. Banned writers in unfree parts of the world were not merely proscribed; they were also vilified. In India, however, the presumption of intellectual freedom and respect had been ever-present except during the dictatorial years of “emergency rule” imposed by Indira Gandhi between 1974 and 1977 after her conviction for electoral malpractice. He had been proud of that openness and had boasted of it to people in the West. India was surrounded by unfree societies—Pakistan, China, Burma—but remained an open democracy; flawed, certainly, perhaps even deeply flawed, but free.
Ever since Midnight’s Children had been so enthusiastically received, the Indian response to his work had been a source of great pride to him, and so the embargo on the importation of The Satanic Verses was a painful blow. Out of that pain he published an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson, a letter some commentators found excessively aggressive. He complained of the official statements that the book had been banned as a preemptive measure. “Certain passages had been identified as susceptible to distortion and misuse, presumably by unscrupulous religious fanatics and such. The banning order had been issued to prevent this misuse. Apparently, my book is not deemed blasphemous or objectionable in itself, but is being proscribed for, so to speak, its own good!… It is as though, having identified an innocent person as a likely target for assault by muggers or rapists, you were to put that person in jail for protection. This is no way, Mr. Gandhi, for a free society to behave.” This was also not how novelists were supposed to behave: scolding a prime minister. This was … arrogant. This was cheek. The Indian press was calling the ban “a Philistine decision,” and an example of “thought control,” but he was supposed to watch what he said.
He had not done so. “What sort of India do you wish to govern? Is it to be an open or a repressive society? Your action in the matter of The Satanic Verses will be an important indicator for many people around the world.” No doubt unwisely, he had accused Rajiv Gandhi of carrying on a family vendetta. “Perhaps you feel that by banning my fourth novel you are taking long overdue revenge for the treatment of your mother in my second, but can you be sure that Indira Gandhi’s reputation will endure better and longer than Midnight’s Children?” Well, okay, that was arrogant. Angry and injured also, but the arrogance was undeniably there. Very well. So it was. He was defending a thing he revered above most things, the art of literature, against a piece of blatant political opportunism. Maybe a little intellectual arrogance was called for. It was not a practical defense, of course; not one calculated to change his adversary’s mind. It was an attempt to take the cultural high ground, and it concluded with a rhetorical appeal to that posterity whose judgment could not be known by either Rajiv Gandhi or himself. “You own the present, Mr. Prime Minister; but the centuries belong to art.”
The letter was widely published on Sunday, October 9, 1988. The next day the first death threat was received at the offices of Viking Penguin. The day after that a scheduled reading in Cambridge was canceled by the venue because it, too, had received threats. The cloud thickened.
The 1988 Booker Prize jury’s decision was swiftly made. The chairman of the judges, Michael Foot, MP, the former Labour Party leader and devotee of Hazlitt and Swift, was a passionate advocate of The Satanic Verses. The other four judges were adamantly convinced of the superior merits of Peter Carey’s excellent novel Oscar and Lucinda. A vote was taken after a short discussion and that was that. Three years earlier Carey’s wonderful comic-picaresque Illywhacker and Doris Lessing’s excellent IRA novel The Good Terrorist had deadlocked the judges and in the end, in a compromise decision, the prize had gone to Keri Hulme’s Maori epic The Bone People. He had had dinner with Peter Carey the night after that result and had told him that his book should have won. Carey talked about the novel he had begun to write. One of his reasons for being in England was to do some research. There was a particular beach in Devon he wanted to visit. He had offered to drive Peter down to the West Country, and they
had spent a fine day traveling through England to the “Hennacombe” in which the child Oscar Hopkins and his fierce father, Theophilus, would live in his novel, just as their real-life models, the writer Edmund Gosse and his father, Philip (like Theophilus, a naturalist, a widower and a member of the Plymouth Brethren), had done in the middle of the nineteenth century. They found the beach four hundred steps down from the top of the cliff. They collected a few shells and many distinctive pink and gray pebbles. They ate a heavy pub lunch of warm beer and meat in dark gravy. All day they spoke of love. He was still with Robyn in those days, and she was Australian, like Carey, of course; and Peter had recently married the Sydney theater director Alison Summers, and was full of passion and joy. By the time they got back to London they had become friends. He broke up with Robyn soon afterward and Peter eventually separated acrimoniously from Alison, but that love could die did not mean it had not lived. After the Booker result was announced he went quickly across the Guildhall to embrace Peter and congratulate him, and to murmur wryly in his ear that the moral of the story was that Writer A should never help Writer B to do his research, because then Writer B would use that research to beat Writer A to the Booker.
It would have been nice to win, but he was happy for Peter and, in truth, more concerned about the growing public argument over his book. A win for The Satanic Verses would have been helpful; it would have moved the “quality defense” back to center stage. But there were bigger issues to worry about. When he got home, around 11 P.M., he found a message on his answering machine asking him to call a Muslim cleric in South Africa urgently, even if it was very late. He had been invited to Johannesburg by the antiapartheid newspaper the Weekly Mail to deliver the keynote address at a conference about apartheid and censorship—an invitation made with the agreement of the “broad democratic movement” in South Africa, in other words, with the implicit backing of the African National Congress—and was scheduled to leave London in four days’ time. “I must speak to you before you fly,” the message said. He was in a strange mood, brought on by a combination of marital difficulties and the events of the evening (this was the night when Marianne told William Golding that she had written a feminist Lord of the Flies), and in the end he decided to make the call. He sat in a darkened living room and listened to a voice from another world tell him he must not come to speak at the Weekly Mail’s conference. The voice described itself as a liberal, modern person, whose concern was twofold: for his safety, and for the well-being of the antiapartheid movement. If he were to visit Johannesburg in the present climate the Muslim reaction would be large and hostile. That would be dangerous both at the personal and political levels. A quarrel within the antiapartheid coalition would be catastrophic and would only serve the interests of the white supremacist regime. He should avoid becoming the catalyst for such a quarrel, and stay away.
The next morning he called Nadine Gordimer who, as the patron of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), was the other sponsor of his invitation to speak. This tiny, indomitable woman was an old friend, and one of the people he most respected and admired. She was extremely agitated and distressed. South African Muslims, usually vociferous in their opposition to the restrictions of apartheid, were threatening a holy war against the blasphemous author and his book. They would kill him and bomb his meetings and attack those who had invited him. The police seemed unable or unwilling to guarantee the safety of those who were being threatened. There was a danger of a rift in COSAW, with its Muslim members threatening to resign en masse, and the loss of funding that would result from such a rupture would be disastrous for that organization. The staff of the Weekly Mail was predominantly Jewish and there was a lot of unpleasant anti-Semitism in the Muslim vitriol. Nadine Gordimer had tried to meet with Muslim leaders to solve the problem, and many highly respected figures in the antiapartheid movement had appealed to the Muslim extremists to back down, but they had not. The prominent Muslim intellectual professor Fatima Meer had stated, “In the final analysis it is the Third World that Rushdie attacks.” In spite of a lifetime of anticolonialism he was being transformed into an oppressor, who had made a “malicious attack on his ethnic past.” Faced with this crisis, the ANC had remarkably said nothing at all. There were many voices raised against the Muslim assault, including those of J. M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard and André Brink, but the Islamists grew more vociferously threatening by the day. Gordimer was plainly shaken and, as a friend, protective. “I can’t bring you into this kind of danger,” she said.
That week, the South African government also banned The Satanic Verses. The banning order disparaged the novel as a “work thinly disguised as a piece of literature,” criticized its “foul language,” and said that it was “disgusting not only to Muslims but to any reader who holds clear values of decency and culture.” Interestingly, the same language could be found in the letter to “Brothers in Islam”—evidently “Sisters in Islam” were not worth addressing—issued by the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs just a few days earlier, on October 28. In that document, the description “thinly disguised as a piece of literature” was also to be found, as well as many of the accusations of abusiveness, filth, and so on. The white racists of South Africa were apparently taking dictation from Mr. Mughram al-Ghamdi, the signatory of the UK Action Committee letter.
After many phone conversations, with Nadine and Anton Harber, the coeditor of the Weekly Mail, he was told that COSAW, for all its political radicalism, was recommending to the newspaper that his invitation be withdrawn. He was saddened to hear that this had precipitated a public quarrel between South Africa’s two greatest writers. J. M. Coetzee opposed the withdrawal of the invitation, saying that the decision to come or not come should be Rushdie’s alone. Nadine Gordimer, immensely regretful, said that the issue of safety was paramount. They were both right, but he did not want his fellow writers to be quarreling over him. He accepted the decision to withdraw the invitation. On the same day, Tony Lacey, his editorial director at Viking, called him to tell him in confidence that The Satanic Verses had won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel. Its “thin disguise as a piece of literature” had obviously worked.
The first piece of hate mail arrived at his London home. The Evening Standard reported on a global Islamic threat to “end Penguin.” The famous lawyer David Napley demanded that he be tried under the Public Order Act. Meanwhile, he and Clarissa took Zafar to watch the Guy Fawkes Night fireworks on Highbury Fields. Marianne turned forty-one, and at lunchtime he went to the Whitbread prize-giving ceremony to receive his award. In the afternoon she quarreled with him. She was hidden in his shadow, she said, and she hated it. That night, still irritable with each other, they went to see Harold Pinter’s play Mountain Language at the National Theatre. He came away feeling that like the people in the play he, too, was being forbidden to use his language. His language was improper, even criminal. He should be tried in court, hounded out of society, even killed. This was all legitimate because of his language. It was the language of literature that was the crime.
A year had passed since his father died. He was glad Anis was not around to see what was happening to his son. He called his mother. Negin supported him staunchly, these terrible people, but, strangely, she defended their God. “Don’t blame Allah for what these people say.” He argued with her. What sort of god could be excused the actions of his followers? Didn’t it, in a way, infantilize the deity to say he was powerless against the faithful? She was adamant. “It’s not Allah’s fault.” She said she would pray for him. He was shocked. This was not the kind of family they had been. His father had been dead for just a year and suddenly his mother was praying? “Don’t pray for me,” he said. “Don’t you get it? That’s not our team.” She laughed, humoring him, but didn’t understand what he was saying.
A solution of sorts was found for the South African problem. He agreed to speak to the Weekly Mail conference by telephone link from London. His voice went to South Africa, his ideas were heard in a
Johannesburg hall he couldn’t see, but he stayed at home. It wasn’t satisfying, but it felt better than nothing.
The grand sheikh of al-Azhar, Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq: The name sounded almost impossibly antiquated to him, an Arabian Nights name belonging to the age of flying carpets and wonderful lamps. This grand sheikh, one of the grand eminences of Islamic theology, a hard-line conservative priest based at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, on November 22, 1988, delivered himself of an utterance against the blasphemous book. He decried the way in which “lies and figments of the imagination” were passed off as facts. He called on British Muslims to bring legal actions against the author. He wanted action from the forty-six-member Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Satanic Verses was not the only book he was upset by. He also renewed his objections to the great Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Children of Gebelawi—also accused of blasphemy because its contemporary narrative was an allegory of the lives of prophets from Abraham to Muhammad. “A novel cannot just be permitted into circulation because its author won the Nobel Prize for Literature,” he declared. “That award does not justify the propagation of misguided ideas.”
Nor was Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq the only Egyptian sheikh to be offended by these books and their authors. The so-called “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, afterward jailed for his involvement in the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, announced that if Mahfouz had been properly punished for Children of Gebelawi, then Rushdie would not have dared to publish The Satanic Verses. In 1994 one of his followers, understanding this statement to be a fatwa, stabbed Naguib Mahfouz in the neck. The elderly novelist survived, fortunately. After the Khomeini fatwa Mahfouz had initially come to the defense of The Satanic Verses, denouncing Khomeini’s act as “intellectual terrorism,” but subsequently he slid toward the opposite camp, declaring that “Rushdie did not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.”
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